Recently Diagnosed - Next Steps?

[Pugsy]

I am going to be up late tonight...Thunderboomers again. Already had a couple of tornado warnings but fortunately away from me and heading in the other direction but we are in the "it might happen area"...
and the wind is horrible.
I am just going to stay up until it passes. I wouldn't sleep anyway with everything rocking and rolling like it is right now.
Should move through fairly quickly.

And yes...if you know you aren't getting enough sleep...that makes a big impact on how we feel.

[palerider]

Yep...dial up EPAP by 1.
You don't have a lot of what I call "clutter" (stuff that isn't included in the AHI) like snores, FLs, RERAs, etc but you do have some and if it were me I would try to clean it up a bit more. Doesn't have to be totally spotless...just a little less clutter.

Other than the "heart attack" thing...how have you been sleeping and feeling using this thing again with the new settings?

I think the quality of my sleep is improved. No doubt. However, I need to get more of it. I go to bed too late.

well, we can't really help with that, unless you provide your address, in which case, someone will be by with a rubber hammer.

NIGHT NIGHT *BONK*

[bigbipper]

Last night's numbers...woke up with a bad headache this morning.

http://imgur.com/a/sGY13

[Pugsy]

Wow. Looks like you should have got up at 6:30.
Any chance you woke up on your back?

[bigbipper]

Wow. Looks like you should have got up at 6:30.
Any chance you woke up on your back?

Actually, there were a lot of disturbances at 6:30. My wife got up. I shut the alarm clock off. Put my phone on the charger. But the headache was there already. So the last 1h15m inflated my AHI?

[Pugsy]

So the last 1h15m inflated my AHI?

Most definitely. I bet there is a lot of SWJ (Sleep/Wake/Junk) flags after 6:30 since you know you weren't sound asleep.

To get a feel for what the AHI would be without that last 1 to 1 1/2 hour you can do this.
Take your mouse cursor and put it over the beginning of the night on the events graph...then click and drag to the right and stop right before the 6:30 time. Then look at the AHI shown on top of the Flow rate chart. That's what the AHI would have been if we omitted the potential SWJ events.

The headache...who knows what it could be from...there's nothing going on prior to 6:30 event wise that would be a likely culprit.
Sometimes we just get a headache and we don't know why.
Now I will share this...I have a bad neck (arthritis) and if I sleep differently or in a weird position on my bed pillow I will wake up with a headache. It's more of a muscle tension headache from the neck not liking the position it was in for whatever reason.
I get those headaches commonly if I go on a trip and don't have my usual bed pillow.
And I get them at home if I end up in some funky position which happens occasionally.

[bigbipper]

So the last 1h15m inflated my AHI?

Most definitely. I bet there is a lot of SWJ (Sleep/Wake/Junk) flags after 6:30 since you know you weren't sound asleep.

To get a feel for what the AHI would be without that last 1 to 1 1/2 hour you can do this.
Take your mouse cursor and put it over the beginning of the night on the events graph...then click and drag to the right and stop right before the 6:30 time. Then look at the AHI shown on top of the Flow rate chart. That's what the AHI would have been if we omitted the potential SWJ events.

Wow. 1.85 up until 6:30am. 24.07 after that.

[Pugsy]

Last night is one of those situations where we don't go changing anything based on one night with one segment of bad results.
In this situation we have a known potential explanation for the ugly...SWJ.
Plus it's the first really ugly segment you have had.
The headache you had prior to the known wake up...so the ugly didn't cause the headache.

[palerider]

The headache you had prior to the known wake up...so the ugly didn't cause the headache.

I never put a whole lot of stock in initial first waking up impressions... since memories are just starting to form and things can get confused with the dozing... it's entirely possible the impression was right, or maybe not.

[Pugsy]

I never put a whole lot of stock in initial first waking up impressions... since memories are just starting to form and things can get confused with the dozing... it's entirely possible the impression was right, or maybe not.

Yeah, I suppose. But as someone who sometimes wakes up with some really nasty headaches I have woke up with one in the middle of the night go back to sleep and wake up with the same damn headache.
All we have to go on is impressions sometimes. We do the best we can with what we got.

[bigbipper]

Morning, All.

So same routine this morning as yesterday. Wife got up at 6:30am and the final hour of data should be thrown out.
AHI up to 6:30am was 4.44

http://imgur.com/a/nwjPO

[Pugsy]

Still a little too much "clutter" even before the 6:30 mark to suit me.
How about increasing EPAP min by 0.5 or 1.0?
The stuff that happened during ramp...were you awake do you think? If the machine wanted to fight it..it could have by suspending ramp briefly and increasing the pressure but it didn't...so I am assuming the machine didn't think the stuff shown in ramp time was worthy of a battle. For sure it wouldn't do anything towards the CAs...it never responds to CAs.

[bigbipper]

Still a little too much "clutter" even before the 6:30 mark to suit me.
How about increasing EPAP min by 0.5 or 1.0?
The stuff that happened during ramp...were you awake do you think? If the machine wanted to fight it..it could have by suspending ramp briefly and increasing the pressure but it didn't...so I am assuming the machine didn't think the stuff shown in ramp time was worthy of a battle. For sure it wouldn't do anything towards the CAs...it never responds to CAs.

No doubt I was up for about the first 25 minutes of ramp. I was not tired last night when I went to bed.

[Pugsy]

I think you can now see what we mean when we talk about SWJ messing with the reporting.
These machines don't know if you are asleep or not. They just measure air flow and our awake/semi awake breathing is so much more irregular than our normal asleep breathing that sometimes it picks up on those irregularities and puts a flag of some sort with it.
We do a lot with our breathing while awake or semi awake that we don't realize we do and it can confuse the machine.
Sometimes is hard to know just how "asleep" we might have really been...like after the known wake up at 6:30 when the wife gets up.
You may or may not have fallen asleep after the wake up...you may have been sort of semi awake. It's hard to tell sometimes even by putting that time frame under the microscope. Sometimes it's easy to spot and sometimes it isn't.

I normally don't trying to put it under the microscope in situations like yours where there is a known wake up at that time.
It involves some work and the end result is usually we don't do anything anyway because we don't know for sure that anything needs to be done.
But this type of situation is where Encore comes in real handy. It gives a wave form report that makes the work so much easier to do.
Using SH to try to evaluate those times up close involves more work and everyone knows I am a lazy sot who never wants to work any more than I have to.

[bigbipper]

Thanks, Pug. Making more and more sense every day.

I have to assume that I am now getting better sleep when compared to a week ago.