maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

General Discussion on any topic relating to CPAP and/or Sleep Apnea.
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cathyf
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by cathyf » Thu Oct 16, 2014 8:06 pm

tmr wrote: Some people needed to cut down on their BP meds because with the use of cpap it got lowered.
Well, since it's always Backwards Day for me...

When I had my sleep study on July 29th, one of the rules was no caffeine after noon that day. For years I have had one Diet Coke with breakfast and one with an afternoon snack -- I don't drink coffee or tea and was desperately trying to stay awake. Since everything that I've read about sleep says that caffeine is a trap that messes up your sleep more, I decided the next day no caffeine either, and the next... I have completely given up diet soda and replaced it with drinking water. (The only other thing I drink is milk with lunch and sometimes dinner.)

I've been taking birth control pills with estrogen for 3.5 years for heavy bleeding, and my clinic PA no longer will prescribe them. I didn't find this out until I went for a refill when I went in to discuss my sleep study. They of course took my blood pressure and pulse, and it was elevated -- yes, after 4 weeks of no caffeine, pulse and BP went UP. So my PA doubled my dose of beta blocker as well as prescribing CPAP. Since she couldn't re-up the BCP script, I made an appointment with a gynecologist, which took some time. By the time I got there I had been off caffeine and artificial sweetners for 7 weeks, off the pill for 4 weeks, and doubled my beta blocker for two weeks. My blood pressure and pulse were both up MORE, AND I gained 5 lbs!

So, yeah, anybody who tells you that artificial sweetners make you fat, and caffeine raises your BP and pulse, and estrogen makes you fat and raises your BP -- I don't want to hear about it!!!

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Pugsy
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by Pugsy » Thu Oct 16, 2014 8:35 pm

Don't feel alone. Effective cpap therapy didn't lower my BP either..boy was I ever hoping it would but it kept climbing and climbing and about a month ago the doc would no longer let me sweet talk him out of BP meds. Used to be I would have enough "good" readings I could sweet talk my way out of it but in the last year the "good" readings have been few and far between and I finally gave in.

Those people who have there BP go lower with cpap therapy...count your blessings..it doesn't always work out that way.
and no....I haven't gained any weight in the last couple of years to blame it on..wish I could blame it on weight gain.

Those people who have their lipid numbers fall with cpap therapy...count your blessings too.

And while I am at it..
those people who wake up ready for that marathon....or ready to do spring cleaning..or want to have sex all day or night ...or you guys who wake up with Mr Woody in bed with you and you haven't seen him in a long time...
all of you people....count your blessings.

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BlackSpinner
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by BlackSpinner » Fri Oct 17, 2014 8:20 am

cathyf wrote: My blood pressure and pulse were both up MORE, AND I gained 5 lbs!

So, yeah, anybody who tells you that artificial sweetners make you fat, and caffeine raises your BP and pulse, and estrogen makes you fat and raises your BP -- I don't want to hear about it!!!
Artificial sweetners don't make you fat but they do a number on your insulin resistance and are correlated with higher incidence of diabetes, obesity and heart issues. It is the lack of oestrogen that makes you put on weight - ask any post menopausal woman.

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webbie73
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by webbie73 » Fri Oct 17, 2014 8:43 am

Cathy, beta blockers can make you gain weight. I was on a beta blocker for a heart arythmia and gained weight without changing my diet. Pharmacist told me they can cause weight gain in some people. There are many BP medications available that are not beta blockers. Maybe talk with your PA and see if they can switch you to something else. BTW I had no change in my BP when I started Cpap.

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cathyf
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by cathyf » Fri Oct 17, 2014 3:29 pm

webbie73 wrote:Cathy, beta blockers can make you gain weight. I was on a beta blocker for a heart arythmia and gained weight without changing my diet. Pharmacist told me they can cause weight gain in some people. There are many BP medications available that are not beta blockers. Maybe talk with your PA and see if they can switch you to something else. BTW I had no change in my BP when I started Cpap.
It's kind of odd because my whole life I have had a fast pulse and low blood pressure. Not abnormally high/low, just right on either edge of normal. I have several amusing stories of passing out, because when my pulse would drop a little (to normal) and my bp would drop a little (to a little too low) then I would be dropping on the floor very soon! When I was pregnant and the baby would be asleep my pulse would be higher than the kid's! So in Dec when my resting pulse started being consistently in the 90-105 range instead of the old 80-95 range, and my BP was 120/80 instead of my old 100/70, the PA convinced me that I really needed to get my pulse down and I took a calcium channel blocker for a month. It had absolutely zilch effect on my pulse, so then I went to the beta blocker and my pulse went nicely back to 80-95. Now I'm edging up to the low-90s again consistently, and my bp is 140/90.

It may be time to try something else... All of this has really happened quickly. It might also be that going off the estrogen has thrown my thyroid out of whack. I went to the endocrinologist this week, and he is running blood tests.

Funny story about beta blockers. Ok, it's only funny if it didn't happen to you! I worked for a tiny little software company, and we were upstairs from a 1-guy computer repair/sales shop. He set us up with a RAID disk on our company server. (RAID means that we had 2 disks and everything was mirrored between the two -- it's a simple and very robust way to protect against a disk crash.) So one day one of the disks in the RAID crashed. No problem, right? Our computer guy just needed to restore from the backup, right? But it turned out that the RAID mirror had never actually been set up correctly, so the mirror was actually completely blank. It also, totally coincidentally, turned out that our guy had just started taking a beta blocker. So he sat there for an entire day listening to the disks go WHIR-CLICK-WHIR-CLICK... And in his beta-blocker-induced zombie haze it didn't occur to him that he was -- block by block -- copying the totally empty disk over the only copy of our server disk. I think MAYBE the NSA knows how to get the data off a disk when this happens, but nobody else does!

So, anyway, I was really happy to be able to get my pulse back under 90 by taking 25mg of indural. I am NOT so happy about taking the dose up to 100mg or more which is what the docs are talking about. Especially when dealing with my husband who thinks that this whole apnea thing is caused by me taking too many meds...

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BlackSpinner
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by BlackSpinner » Fri Oct 17, 2014 6:20 pm

So, anyway, I was really happy to be able to get my pulse back under 90 by taking 25mg of indural. I am NOT so happy about taking the dose up to 100mg or more which is what the docs are talking about. Especially when dealing with my husband who thinks that this whole apnea thing is caused by me taking too many meds...
So unless your husband is a pharmacist or has a medical degree just tell him to go and suck eggs. It is your body and your medical issues and he just needs to keep his trap shut and be supportive.

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cathyf
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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by cathyf » Sat Oct 18, 2014 8:38 am

To be fair, my father-in-law died from side effects of a drug he didn't need to take, so my husband is a little sensitive about these things and I am, too...

(My FIL received one of the first generation of implantable defibrillators. The experts thought, from the animal studies and the pilot studies on people, that these were going to work really well, but they couldn't be sure until they actually used them in people -- like my father-in-law -- in a widespread way. Since they didn't know for sure, they left him on all of the traditional heart drugs, too. Including a drug Corderone, which they knew was pretty dangerous. The defibrillator was an amazing success for him, and has been one of the bright shining stars of heart care advances. But the Corderone killed him. This is not anything like malpractice, just making the best decisions at the time with the information they had at the time, and now we have more and better information and make different decisions. Some of that more and better information being my father-in-law's experience...)

As I reach middle age and add more and more health problems (including 2 auto-immune diseases), I'm pretty aware of the phenomenon where you use more and more drugs and treatments to chase the side-effects of the other drugs and treatments. That can spiral out of control pretty quickly! I've only been on xPAP for a week, which is too soon to see what changes that is going to make. I've been waking up in the middle of panic attacks regularly for years, with a racing heartbeat, and now I'm doing something that might just reset my circulatory system to something more like its previous state. Also, I find that my pulse is a much better indicator of what is going on with my circulation. My PA has adopted this extremely simple practice of having the nurse take a patient's blood pressure at the beginning of an appointment, and then the PA takes it twice -- once when she walks in the door and then the last thing before she walks out. It doesn't take hardly any time, doesn't cost any more money, and it gives everybody a clear indication of what the real variability of a patients' blood pressure is. I've seen my systolic pressure go from 145 to 115 to 125 over the course of a half hour, so a single reading of 141 doesn't really scare me.

Oh, and one last thing... My husband has a PhD in theoretical physics and has been teaching physics to pre-meds, pre-pharmacy, nursing, etc. students for 30 years. He knows a LOT about interpreting scientific data, and he knows that doctors generally don't...

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Re: maybe I don't have apnea, or is CPAP really THIS good?

Post by Tatooed Lady » Tue Oct 21, 2014 1:10 pm

Pugsy wrote:..not waking up every hour on the hour with a screaming painful bladder is worth it to me if I never so any improvement in anything else.
AMEN!!!!

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