Cover of Hilbert Haar’s “Breathless – Diary of a Patient with Sleep Apnoea”.
PHILIPSBURG--In December 2022, journalist Hilbert Haar was diagnosed with vascular dementia, or cognitive impairment. Its main cause was years of sleep apnoea, a disorder that general practitioners seldom consider, mainly because patients report vague complaints that are oftentimes associated with burnout.
Patients who suffer from sleep apnoea stop breathing more than once during their sleep, for several seconds. This results in a shortage of oxygen supply to the brain, with all its consequences.
Vascular dementia is a process that can be halted, according to some medical professionals. It is also reversible provided it is diagnosed at an early stage.
Sleep apnoea can be corrected with the use of breathing equipment. This treatment usually results in behavioural and cognitive improvements. Using blood thinners also contributes to manage the process.
In Breathless – Diary of a Patient with Sleep Apnoea, Haar details his journey through the medical jungle where he was diagnosed with vascular dementia and moderate sleep apnoea and describes what happened at the time of his scary diagnosis and what his experiences are with the use of blood thinners and breathing equipment.
The objective of his diary is to draw attention to the sleep apnoea phenomenon. “The sooner patients begin with a treatment, the better their perspectives are,” he said.
Haar (1950) is a Dutch journalist who worked for several newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands until he emigrated with his wife Myriam to Greece in 1996.
After seven years on the island of Crete and three years in the United States he travelled to St. Maarten, where he became the editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper Today. When the paper ceased to exist after the devastating Hurricane Irma in 2017 the author started writing for website
stmaartennews.com.
Ten months after Irma, he left St. Maarten together with his wife for a trip around the world. He visited the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Poland, Russia, Mongolia, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Malaysia (where he wrote Diary of a Psychopath/Dagboek van een Psychopaat), and Indonesia. In 2023 he returned to Thailand.
His first thriller The Ultimate God Conspiracy appeared in English as an E-book at Smashwords in 2018.
Breathless has been published as an E-book by Smashwords and Amazon. There is also a version available in the Dutch language under the title Ademloos – Dagboek van een patiënt met slap apnea.
