One Man’s Battle with Sleep and the Unexpected Discovery He Made About His Pet
Getting enough sleep is essential to staying healthy. We all know that lack of sleep makes us irritable, forgetful and more likely to suffer from a variety of physical ailments, and can even lead to a higher risk of accidents and life-threatening conditions.
For Luis Navarro, sleep was an obstacle course every night. He often woke up gasping for air in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep. His sleep grew increasingly worse, and in the end he was left feeling drained and unsure why sleep had become such a struggle. But his sleepless nights weren’t due to a medical problem. It was something else entirely much more unexpected.
CCTV Camera
Luis had recently acquired a kitten named Loki from a local Shelter. The cat, a high-spirited tabby, quickly integrated into the Navarro family but it didn’t take long for Luis to notice something peculiar about Loki’s behavior.
Each night, Loki would sit by Luis’s side as he slept, unblinking and intense. At first, Luis dismissed it as no big deal. But as the days trickled by, his inability to get a decent night’s sleep only grew more awful, and the strange antics of his cat became impossible to ignore.
It was 4:03 a.m. one morning, to be exact when Luis was jolted awake, panic coursing through his veins. He had difficulty breathing and had suddenly awakened, coughing and gasping for air.
When he got out of bed to get a glass of water a few moments later, he nearly jumped at the sight of Loki, standing in the middle of the hallway, staring directly at him with unblinking eyes.
Loki’s face was stroked one way by the moonlight; the glint from the lucid trace around his eye made the cat’s predilection feel strange, ghostly. Luis got a chill down his spine.
This moment started Luis on a lifetime investigation into the mystery of the source of his bad sleep.
He had already experimented with a range of sleep remedies, like cutting caffeine from his diet and limiting exposure to blue light given off by electronic devices.
He tried everything, but nothing would work. It was a problem that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard you tried. It became obvious that the reason for his sleepless nights was something other than just a change in habits.
Luis started looking into possible sleep disorders that might be responsible for his symptoms. He stumbled upon sleep apnea, a disorder in which people temporarily stop breathing while they’re asleep, frequently jolting awake in the middle of the night.
People who have sleep apnea might not always know that they’ve stopped breathing, but the consequences of the condition can leave them feeling wiped out and disoriented during the day.
Curious, Luis took matters into his own hands. He set up a camera in his bedroom to watch what was going on while he was sleeping.
To his amazement, the video footage showed a shocking fact: his cat, Loki, was the one waking him up at night.
CCTV Camera
Every night, Loki would park himself next to Luis’s bedside and stare at him, sometimes for hours. The cat’s behavior was not just odd — it was weird. Loki’s eyes, ever wide and unblinking, appeared to train on Luis with an intensity that seemed to me to belie mere curiosity.
Initially, Luis did not know why the cat would behave that way. But after going through the footage, he concluded that the cat wasn’t just watching him out of love or curiosity. Loki was probably mirroring closer to Luis’s breathing patterns.
Luis had developed a mild case of sleep apnea, which made him stop breathing during the night.
He's very sensitive to the environment so when he noticed the breathing was different, instinctively he had would lay near [him]. It seemed that Loki had been looking at Luis, as if to warn him that he was having trouble breathing. The cat’s behavior, while unnerving, was a sign of love.
The finding was both a relief and a surprise. Luis was able to verify that his lack of sleep was not due to stress, excessive screen time, or other external factors he had previously thought of.
Instead, it was his own health that had failed him. The cat’s intensity in staring that day had been because he believed that Luis's breath had caused him to wake during the sleep process through his inability to find a rhythm with the breathing, and so he had been worried about him.
Armed with this understanding, Luis got medical attention and was diagnosed with sleep apnea.
He also been prescribed a treatment plan that included lifestyle modifications and the use of a CPAP machine at night to aid in maintaining proper respiratory function.
After a while his sleep settled down, and he stopped waking in panic, gasping for air. And though he still couldn’t entirely shake the memory of Loki’s unblinking stare, he had come to regard his cat’s strange behavior in a new way.
This is a reminder to pay attention to the signs they give us. Loki’s staring was more than a quirk, some odd behavior — it was an indication that something was amiss with Luis’s health and that the cat’s instincts had unwittingly led him to the key.
It also reminds us that our pets are often aware of things that we adults may not catch and sometimes their strange and funny behaviors are just not just that.
In the scenario with Loki, his actions protected Luis from getting any more harm than he had already suffered and easily guided him towards the solution to his sleep troubles.
In the end, Luis discovered that the answers to our problems are sometimes right there in front of us and sometimes, they’re staring us right in the face.
And in this instance, the culprit behind his sleepless nights wasn’t a strange medical ailment, but the loving stare of his cat, Loki, who had been trying to help him all along.
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