Pugsy wrote:How come the wake ups? Any idea?
Not a lot of clues... Maybe it's menopause -- yes, sleep disturbances are one of the more crippling effects. Maybe it's habit -- the last couple of nights when I have woken up -- at least later in the night -- I've been able to stay in bed and just be annoyed at being awake and eventually go back to sleep, because my back teeth have NOT been floating. But before the cpap I got up a LOT to go potty. It's been that way for a LONG time -- at least 20 years -- because when I found out 20 years ago that in order to take basal body temps you need to have been asleep for at least 4 straight hours I was SHOCKED. I think I get 4 hours in a row a couple of times per year. Looking over the nights, my best night was Saturday night. I was doing laundry and didn't get into bed until 12:30 and slept until 6:15.
I didn't put my events on there. I am not having hardly any -- AHI is 0.36 -- and a lot of them are when I am awake. Or, to pick on Frank again, I've got hypopneas that just show up out of the blue, just one, and then the night goes along like nothing happened.
My machine is set at 7-20, and like I said, it doesn't seem to have any trouble picking high pressures and just staying there. Given what y'all are saying about trying to get settings where the machine will behave, I'm getting the feeling that if I were on a machine with the technology from 20 years ago it would not be working nearly so well...
One thing... I have an enlarged thyroid, and a couple of months ago I noticed that at the very end of an exhale I would get a short little "squeak". It's totally unpredictable and I haven't figured out how to cause it to happen, I just notice that it's happening. It does seem to happen more when I am on my left side, which puts the right lobe of my thyroid (the larger one) on the top of a thyroid-windpipe sandwich. I have not heard/felt one at all since I have been on the cpap. It's possible that I have flow limitations all of the time, awake and asleep. Certainly the flow limitation graph is not recognizably distinct when I am awake.
I do sing in 2 community choruses and a church choir, and can sing long phrases and stay on pitch, so it's not SO limited.