I never believed I had any symptoms of narcolepsy - when my sleep doc would question me about cataplexy, hypnagognic hallucinations, etc, - I would always say "no." It was only after the MSLT test results and an in depth conversation with my sleep doctor did I fully understand what the symptoms of narcolepsy were. I had believed the symptoms of narcolepsy were severe (i.e. - fall down asleep in the middle of conversations) - but after a thorough explanation of the subtlety of the symptoms, I realized I did indeed experience some symptoms.SleepingUgly wrote:bigdaddy raises some important questions, the most important of which is this: Do you have ANY symptoms of narcolepsy other than EDS? Do you have sleep attacks? Cataplexy? Sleep paralysis? I bet there are a lot of clues from the history that would suggest whether narcolepsy is a bona fide diagnosis or not (e.g., if bfoot is 60 years old and developed problems with EDS 10 years ago, I would not find a diagnosis of narcolepsy very compelling).
Another possibility is that even though the treatment eliminated your obstructive events, did it replace apneas/hypopneas with RERAs that were just as disturbing to your sleep even though they weren't detected by your machine? (No way to tell now) Narcolepsy leads to very disturbed sleep architecture. Are there clues in the sleep architecture? (Don't ask me!)
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I am 38 years old and cannot recall a time when I felt like I do now (on Nuvigil). Even with the successful treatment of the OSA with BiPap- I still felt horrible during the day. The Nuvigil does make me feel alert and awake as opposed to constantly battling not falling asleep. I do have some concerns about taking this for the rest of my life, and I will be asking my sleep doc the questions Bigdaddy listed (by the way - thanks for the help Bigdaddy, I appreciate it).
