Our mothers always tell us to get a good night's sleep, but for some it is really difficult if not impossible. According to a National Sleep Foundation poll, 20 percent of Americans are sleeping less than six hours a night up from 12 percent in 1998. In contrast, only 21 percent get eight hours of sleep. Most Americans, 56 percent, get between six and eight hours of sleep, but is that sleep refreshing? That is a whole different question.

For several years, I thought everything was great and that I was getting a good amount of sleep, but about six years ago, I found out how wrong I was. Three years before, I was having an issue with my eye. I was taking a picture of an Easter egg hunt, and when I put the viewfinder up to my eye everything was blurred. I thought maybe the cold air was fogging up the viewfinder, so I waited a minute and then tried again. I ended up taking the photograph anyway, and it seemed OK. A few weeks later I was reading a book and I happened to cover my right eye, and I realized my left eye was blurred. It was impossible to read the letters.I figured I needed new glasses, so we went to the optometrist, and that was where I received one of the biggest shocks of my life: My left eye was legally blind. I could see out of it and still can to this day, but I cannot see details. Fortunately, my right eye was good. Add to that a very unsympathetic, patronizing specialist, and I had a rough time for a bit. We checked the obvious causes of blindness in an early middle-age adult including extreme hypertension and diabetes, but I had neither of those. My blood pressure at the time was barely a mild case, and I am not diabetic.The interesting thing even though the doctors won't admit it is that my great-grandfather had the exact same venal occlusion in his left eye at the age of 37 just like I did. Later, a much more caring optometrist explained that the opening in the back of my eye is smaller than usual and was probably hereditary. There is no cure other than a spontaneous recovery, which did not happen in my case. Such a miracle only happens in less than 10 percent of all cases. I moved on and didn't think much about it.Three years passed and I gradually thought that things didn't seem totally right. I would wake up more often than not with headaches. I was usually up two or three times to go to the bathroom, but I didn't think much of it. Gradually, strange things would occur. At night I would have nightmares of being paralyzed and unable to breathe, like I was being crushed. I would wake up and drift back to sleep. By the time I drove to Bethlehem to work I would be exhausted. I actually fell asleep for a few seconds at a street light in Bath. I rationalized it away, but then something happened that forced me to confront it.While in my office at work, I would have visions and strange hallucinations, almost like daydreams. Then one day I realized I had blacked out for almost a half-hour. I had no recollection of the block of time. Around that time, my co-worker found me asleep, but rather than tell me, she decided to try to get me into trouble with our boss. I was defensive, but I realized something was wrong and I told my boss that was not me. She agreed something could be wrong and waited for me to see if I was having a medical problem.My doctor prescribed a sleep study. They wired me up like a Christmas tree and I went to bed. It was one of the easiest, most painless tests I ever did. It was supposed to be two nights. The first night was a baseline and the second night would be with a machine if I needed it. Things did not work out that way, though. Within two hours, the technician was in to wake me and put a mask on me. Apparently in that two-hour period, I stopped breathing 150 times. I slept the rest of the night better than I had in months.The doctor explained to me that I had extreme sleep apnea which could cause many of problems that I experienced, including high spikes in blood pressure, blackouts in daytime hours with vivid hallucinations and frequent night trips to the bathroom as well as headaches. He told me that basically the mechanism in my brain that makes my body move to unblock my air passage could become damaged after years of sleep apnea and eventually I would stop breathing and not start again. That terrified me, so from that day I have religiously used a machine. It took almost six months to get back to normal.Don't waste time or suffer from a degraded quality of life. If you have similar symptoms, you might want to consider getting tested. It will be the easiest thing you do, and the rewards are great. To rest again peacefully is awesome. It is the kindest thing you can do for yourself.Flight 370 Watch: It was reported this week that the co-pilot on Flight 370 made a phone call from the cockpit during the mysterious flight.Supposedly only the co-pilot's phone was detected. And the questions just keep piling up.Till next time …