Post
by cpapwife (as guest) » Tue Nov 07, 2017 5:54 pm
Hi, my husband uses an o2 concentrator with his cpap.
He is a notorious hypoapnea breather - just lying down to be quite can drop his O2 saturation (yes we bought our own to test, just cause it seemed like a good idea). He was diagnosed with sleep apnea, waking up 91 times an hour, with things getting worse maybe during REM but not clearly figured out.
The software on our machine (philips resprionics system one, in the process of getting a new one currently) showed treated (8-11 range, hangs out at 9/10 most of the night), getting from below 1 up to 2 AHIs a night, that most of his events are hypoapnea.
While testing o2 saturation, he drops below 90 regularly each night for a while (if I remember right it is a longer period of a couple of hours where he goes lower - though up and down in the actual number).
We talked to our sleep Dr about this and were told:
1) We should all be pretty high whether awake or asleep, standing or sitting, etc. Numbers above 95 are good but people without problems are typically higher than that (like 97 - again this is off the top of my head).
Note: Hubby will do 95 or 97 when sitting up awake, but drops big time just laying down and relaxing.
2) Insurance covers O2 concentrates when the person is below 88 for more than 4 minutes (again off the top of my head so I might be off a little on the # of minutes, but pretty short period of time). That is over a night and I think they add them all up and you don't have to be continually under 88 for 4 full minutes.
Note: I was not happy about that number, 90 vs 95 felt pretty big to me, 88 was even lower.
Our o2 tester was not valid to submit for report, we had to get one from the Dr (simple one that squeezes your finger, nothing special). The first night while dropping below 90 as usual, he didn't drop below 88. We asked for another night, got it actually over a weekend (picked it up Fri), and ran it for two nights. Both showed under 88 and they accepted the information. Note, we ran ours on the other hand just to compare the two.
We got approved for an o2 concentrator but took a quick look on craigslist and found a lightly used (300 hours or so) Invocare Solo2 for $300 and figured that would be cheaper than our copay with insurance and took it (we liked that it was a smaller machine also).
Hubby used it with 2 liters per minute (what Dr prescribed) and big difference. It raised his O2 stat levels about 3 points on average and he never dropped below 90 the entire night (hit 90 but not below). While I would love 95, having it be 95 most of the night and above 90 the rest of the night made me happier.
The machine goes up to 3 liters per minute. So he uses it at that level. I don't remember clearly if we checked o2 at 3 lpm but fuzzily I think we did (it would have been like me to do that) and I don't think there was a big difference. Hubby doesn't report feeling different at 2 vs 3 liters. But he also reported not feeling different when a bad sleep Dr did a study and put him on a cpap of 8 and his AHIs jumped high (as well as his O2 saturation dropped low).
I am not on this forum often (just when I need to research something new), but feel free to PM. Though I realized I was not getting PMs and had an old email listed, when I updated this my account got deactivated. Hopefully that will get fixed soon and I can get and send PMs again.
