Corine was told she was sleeping ‘too much’

Corine Tsang didn’t know why she felt so tired throughout the day. A busy teacher and mother of-three, she felt constant fatigue she couldn’t explain.
“I went to the doctors constantly complaining of fatigue,” Tsang, 37, tells 9honey.
This continued “for years” until the Wagga Wagga local reached her breaking point earlier this year.
“I’m like, ‘That’s it, can I please have a referral to, like, a specialist?'” she recalls.
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It was then Tsang’s doctor told her he wanted her to take a sleep test.
“I kind of just did it to appease him,” she says of the sleep test, which would detect if she was suffering from sleep apnea, a potentially serious sleeping disorder where breathing stops and starts throughout the night.
Tsang didn’t think she met the criteria for the condition, aside from feeling “exhausted” all the time.
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“I don’t meet the the traditional triggers of being male, older, overweight, anything like that,” she says.
Tsang thought she was a good sleeper.
”I don’t snore. I don’t wake up. I go to sleep and I fall asleep really quickly. I can sleep 12 hours a night,” she says.
“I didn’t have sleep disruption.”
After using at-home sleep aponea test from Blooms the Chemist, Tsang discovered she was suffering from the condition and would stop breathing for “up to a minute 50 [seconds].”
“I never imagined that would be me. It was a real shock to have the diagnosis,” she says.
The describes the sleep aponea test as “easy to use.”
“You peel back a sticker, you stick it on your head and then on the app you just press ‘start sleep study,'” she explains.
The results showed her condition was serious.
“I remember going to the GP in my early 20s and them saying, ‘You’re oversleeping, you need to retrain your sleep patterns’,” Tsang recalls.
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“That was the first time I ever remember talking to a doctor about my sleep.”
Treatment is simply using a CPAP machine that uses mild air pressure to keep breathing airways open.
Tsang was already a side sleeping, so found it easier to adjust to sleeping while wearing a mask.
She says using the CPAP machine has made a “huge difference” and she began feeling better “literally the next morning.”
“I thought, ‘No, this is the placebo effect, this is just me wanting it to work’,” she says.
“And then by day three I was like, ‘No, this is how you’re meant to live, this is what breathing overnight feels like’ …
“I didn’t realise the brain fog that I existed with, and so that being gone and being able to kind of have that clear head was unreal.”
Tsang urges those suffering from prolonged fatigue to talk to their GPs.
Pharmacist and owner of Blooms the Chemist at Padstow in Sydney, David Tran, says most people with sleep apnoea aren’t aware that they have stopped breathing which can lead to poor sleep.
“There are a range of causes of sleep apnoea, including age, weight, alcohol consumption, narrowed airways, large tonsils or adenoids, nasal congestion and/or other medical conditions,” he says.
“Although the risk factors are similar for men, hormonal changes, such as menopause, can increase the overall risk for women,” he explains.
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