bwexler wrote:You have received a lot of great advice and you need to apply most of it.
Everyone has overlooked one of your concerns. You complained about difficulty breathing with the mask on.
Bwexler brings up a good point Sonya, we do need to tackle the fact that you are having difficulty breathing with the mask on. Here's your original quote about the breathing problems:
Sonya wrote: I have trouble with exhaling through my tiny reptilian nostril slots It feels suffocating. I came down with a cold while traveling a couple weeks ago and the nasal pillows were impossible. I ended up using Afrin nasal spray before bed, but then got the rebound which made it worse.
Questions for you to answer that will help us help you more effectively:
1) Do you breathe through your nose
comfortably when you are awake and going about your daily activities? Or do you have congestion problems and problems with exhaling even when the mask is NOT on your nose?
2) Are you using the optional heated
hose with your PR System One Series 60 machine? If so, what do you have the humidity level set to? If not, are you using the heated humidifier? If so, at what setting?
3) When you say that you feel like you are suffocating with the mask on, does that mean you are having trouble
exhaling fully enough? Or are you having trouble
inhaling enough to feel comfortable? The two sensations are quite different, but newbies often use, "I feel suffocated" to describe both feelings.
4) What pressure range is your machine currently running in? And do you have A-Flex turned on, and if so, what's the A-Flex setting? And are you using the Ramp setting?
Here's why we need the additional information:
1) Daytime nose breathing problems can indicate that you may need a full face mask instead of the nasal pillows mask you are currently using. Daytime nose breathing issues can also indicate that you have a septum that is so badly deviated that surgery may help the daytime breathing issues, and once you are breathing more clearly through your nose, it may be much easier to adapt to using the CPAP at night. But if daytime breathing problems are NOT an issue, then these are things that are likely unimportant when it comes to getting you compliant and keeping you compliant.
2) Humidity needs vary a lot from PAPer to PAPer. A lot of sleep clinics, DMEs, and sleep docs naively believe that if congestion on CPAP is an issue, the answer must be "use more humidity." While that works for some of us, it does not work for everybody. There are plenty of people who find too much added humidity causes just as much as too little added humidity. Experimenting with the humidity settings is the only way to find out if too much or too little humidity is causing the excess congestion.
3) If the suffocation feeling is coming from not being able to
exhale completely, then we usually attack the problem through exhalation relief, the ramp, and/or reducing the pressure if that can be done and still treat the OSA sufficiently well. But if the suffocation feeling is coming from not being able to
inhale completely, the usual fixes are to NOT use the ramp, increase the minimum pressure setting, and turn the exhalation relief setting down. As you can see, the fixes for "can't exhale comfortably" and "can't inhale comfortably" are not the same, and in fact, fixes for one of these problems is likely to make the other problem feel worse.
4) In order to make useful suggestions about how to tackle the suffocation feeling, we not only need to know more about what you mean by "I feel suffocated", we also need to know what pressures you are currently trying to use and whether you have A-Flex turned on or off and whether you are using the ramp.