Apnea

For Charles Capella, a long-distance truck driver, sleeping on the job could be a dangerous practice. The Bristol resident, 43, learned to cope with his chronic drowsiness by pulling off to the side of the road for a nap. At home, he often dozed while watching television. Yet when he went to bed, he was restless. And when he slept, his snoring was so raucous that his wife had to move to another bedroom. "I was getting disgusted with him," Sandy Capella, his wife of 15 years, recalled recently.

A judge who kept falling asleep on the bench . . . a Catholic priest who constantly dozed off and began snoring while hearing confessions . . . a casino pit boss who was about to be fired because he would fall asleep while counting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of chips. Not to mention a financial analyst who was about to lose his job because he would nod off over his computer, and a government official who was about to be canned because he couldn't stay awake at important meetings.

Jeanne Alper, mother of 2-month-old, dressed-in-pink Elizabeth Ann, doesn't mind when babies cry. "You know they're breathing when their screaming," said the Audubon mother with a rueful smile. While her comment might seem strange to outsiders, the group gathered recently at West Jersey Hospital-Voorhees knew exactly what she meant. They are parents of infants afflicted with apnea, a temporary cessation of breathing that can result in crib death. At West Jersey, parents meet twice a month to discuss their experiences and hear speakers.

Kevin McKenna shrugged. "I feel deeply for the parents," McKenna said, shaking his head. "You can see the fear in their eyes. You know they feel helpless. I admire their courage. " This was at Cooper Hospital / University Medical Center in Camden, where McKenna discussed studies of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) last week. McKenna, Cooper's chief sleep-lab technician, has conducted hundreds of studies on babies since 1982. He is also the inventor of a new sleep- monitoring device that hospital officials consider a breakthrough in the study of SIDS.