I did my sleep study when I was 24. There were no drugs involved. It's just a bunch of sensors taped to you while you sleep with a camera watching you.
Bit odd of an experience, but nothing that should concern you much.
Echoing others' encouragement. My study was an easy at-home test which confirmed how bad my hypopnia was, mostly from the blood/oxygen ratio. Mine was going down into the 70s. It was so bad that immediately after that, they scheduled an inpatient test with the PAP machine.
I was super skeptical of being able to sleep a) in a strange bed, b) with all those sensors on my head/chest, c) 4 hours earlier than usual, and d) on my back/side. (I was a hardcore stomach sleeper before.)
At the second study, they strapped me into the sensor harness, put on the mask, and turned out the lights. It took what felt like about 5 minutes to get used to the sensation, but then I was out. Like someone flipped a switch to "Sleep now." Eight hours went by like a flash.
I woke up the next morning super refreshed and feeling amazing. When they said it would be three days until I could get my machine, I was kind of sad.
Eight years later, I've still got the same machine, and it's still like hitting an off switch when I put it on. I only average about 4.5 hours' sleep during the week, but it's turbocharged. My AHI seldom crosses 2.0 and I can see exactly what I'm doing via SleepyHead.
Best decision I've made health-wise, except maybe kicking sugared soda.
Edit: it also let me drop my hypertension prescription to the minimum dose.
You're ultimately in control of the situation. If you explicitly tell them that under no circumstances do you want to take a drug to induce sleep, they're not going to force you to. You could just call it off if you can't sleep.
I've taken a sleep study before; they're not that weird, just a pile of sensors and a bed. And I also know from multiple people that if you do have any form of apnea, addressing it can have a life-changing impact.
Nowadays I believe an at-home "study" is more common, cheap, easy, and non-disruptive.
They give you a little case of sensors to take home & show you how you should attach them before bed. Chiefly it's a finger pulse oximeter & something worn on the chest to measure sleep orientation, chest motion, and record snoring sounds. You sleep as normal, at home, and return the devices the next day for its readings to be interpreted.
So: your concern about being in an unfamiliar setting, or being offered drugs to sleep, may be outdated. OTOH, if you're not in general risk groups nor experiencing daytime tiredness, there may not be not much reason to dig further (unless your wife has noticed something else worrisome).
That does not match my experience (but n=1 and all).
In my case, the result of the sleep study where I didn't really sleep was, "hmm ... it looks like you might have insomnia." (No kidding). No drugs were offered -- or forced -- during the study.
Have gone through 3 sleep studies. No drugs were offered and I never got to sleep. You would be fully within your rights to decline any such offer and they wouldn’t give a shit anyway.
Given your sleep routine I promise the study would be pure hell. They are for me. But I need that APAP.
See! You get it! If I felt I had an urgent problem I'd just deal with the study, but "feeling tired during the day" is very, very low on my list of complaints. I sort of feel like I get away with murder, biologically; I go to sleep at 1AM and get up at 7AM and do just fine.
On the other hand, my wife tells me I snore and randomly stop breathing, so I have reason to believe there's something going on.
> On the other hand, my wife tells me I snore and randomly stop breathing
Snoring is "fine". There is some resistance, but it's likely you can still breathe sufficiently. The problem is when snoring stops.
By the way, my first sleep study was crap and I couldn't sleep and no conclusions were drawn.
The second was at home and I had a cpap machine waiting for me one day after I returned the results.
> If I felt I had an urgent problem I'd just deal with the study
By the time it's urgent you are already deep into other issues, such as high blood pressure. And now you have more than one issue to deal with. This is like the biological version of tech debt.
One problem with waiting is that as apnea worsens it can cause depression and sap your will. That's what happened to me. I knew I needed to get treatment, but that became totally disconnected from my will to start the process. My wife was the one who ended up calling the doctor to set things up.
Better to start the process early and as a side bonus not sacrifice so many brain cells to hypoxia.
Have you thought about an at-home sleep study? My wife and I both did that to get our CPAPs prescribed. Just had to wear a band around the chest (with a little unit that read the force of expansion, I presume), a pulse-ox sensor (IIRC), and something else I can't recall. I'm sure it's not perfect, but my doctor recommended it and was happy enough with it.
I'm the greater insomniac in my household, so I was the one to note my wife's snoring and breathing cessations. She felt fine in the morning. A sleep study showed her PO2 levels dipping as low as 76. She's a CPAP user now.
I think of sleep apnea as a bit like chronic high blood pressure: few or no perceptible symptoms until you become a dialysis or stroke patient.
It's a PITA, that's for sure. There were no drugs in mine. But I reasoned that it's only 1 night. I chose a time where I didn't have work the next day. No big deal, it's not like you have to do it for a month straight. Do you not get any time off work at your job?
> my wife tells me I snore and randomly stop breathing
This is bad for her and worse for you. You have an apnea for sure. You’re losing brain cells unnecessarily. Luckily I know your posting history and you can obviously afford them. I can’t! But for your wife’s sake get a home sleep study.
I probably will sometime in 2019 (for totally unrelated reasons having to do with insomniaphobia, I have a pretty odd sleeping arrangement that involves me sleeping mostly upright these days which I'm told has mitigated this problem).
I'm just saying: if I could just buy the damned APAP and try it out, I would do that first. Friends who've gotten sleep studies have uniformly described it as simply a hurdle to getting the actual RX for the machine, and that all the learning and diagnostics happened after they started with the machine.
You can just buy the damned APAP. The gear I use can be had off Amazon for about $700. A Respironics Dreamstation, and a Resmed Swift FX nasal pillow with headgear and quick connect hose. Probably cheaper if insurance covers it, but you don't actually need it.
If you think you can breathe through your nose with your mouth closed, the nasal pillows are nicer. If not, get a mask. They're nice to have anyways, if colds clog your nose.
You can buy used CPAP/APAP machines from Craigslist or wherever used things are sold. Or so I'm told.
You should do it so your wife can sleep at night instead of hearing your snoring, even if you don't care about being healthy yourself. Sheesh...
There are many, many stubborn guys who refuse to try CPAP machines for years and years, and regret their lost years enormously afterwords. When you get to your sleep doctor, he can tell you what an archetype you are.
My insurance requires 3 at-home failures (as in bad data, etc) before they will even approve an in-lab. I'm sure you can request one if they don't; it's cheaper for them.
They don’t really need all that much data. An hour or so of solid sleep will give them what they need.
The full Monty study is pretty bad, with ECG wires all over your body and EEG electrodes all over your scalp. Nobody gets much sleep, but again, they only need a little data, and most people manage to fall asleep eventually,
This does not reflect my experience. Besides, taking Ambien would show different brain waves than actual sleeps so it would make it less useful as well.
Bit odd of an experience, but nothing that should concern you much.