Is it a high possibility that my severe fatigue and other symptoms are caused by sleep apnea? WatchPAT ONE home study sh

Some insurers will not pay for an in-lab titration or split study. Kaiser is one of them. They diagnose via Watch Pat and titrate via APAP. The APAP also helps them judge who will be compliant if they are going to pay for the machine (rarely these days except for Medicare, and even then there's a perpetual rental so they end up making it up the cost on the back end). And it's your normal sleeping conditions over a period of time, so that can be more accurate than a one-night snap shot in a very foreign environment, although Roby Sue brings up some valid points about the fact that in-lab gives you a lot more data points to determine things like whether you were actually asleep and whether there is a more complex issue than run of the mill OSA.

With respect to waking up gasping for air, have you been checked for reflux? That causes those exact symptoms in that stomach acids come up into the airway and can be aspirated into the lungs. However, usually if you have one condition--e.g. reflux--it makes it more likely that you ALSO have sleep apnea and possibly asthma related to both of those. The theory is that apnea causes a negative pressure gradient that pulls stomach contents up into the airway (reflux) which irritates the airway (asthma) and causes edema in the airway (obstruction) and each of the other conditions, in turn, contributes to the others.

Of course there are many other conditions that can cause or contribute to your symptoms. One of the issues with medicine these days is that if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, a GI doc is going to see only GI issues, a pulmonary doc is only going to see lung and airway issues, a neurologist is only going to see neurological issues. If you can possibly find a well-respected functional MD or DO who has a more wholistic approach of looking at the entire person, you may have better luck getting to the bottom of your issues. They can be hard to find, particularly good ones also covered by insurance. But worth considering.