making progress

Making progress - thanks to Pugsy and others on the forum!

My ONLY real problems were mask-related. I know that is a big one. I am pretty convinced, after trying 3 full face masks, that they just don't fit my face. It is like I need a medium across the nose and cheeks and a extra small below my lips. I get a see/saw effect with them, causing massive leaks under my lower lips. I tried using mask liners, but that did not plug the leak under my lower lip and made them even tighter in the face area. They did not fit "flat" on my face. I am quite sure I fitted them correctly.

When I first started using the nasal pillow masks, which I absolutely love, I had problems with air leaking into my mouth and then out my lips or swallowing the air. This would happen just as I was falling asleep, waking me up. If I fell asleep successfully, I would wake up in the middle of the night with what seemed like massive amounts of air escaping from my mouth. It seemed like the machine was ramping up the pressure. So, since my ENT told me I simply MUST stop the mouth breathing to prevent my intermittent sore throat problems, I went on a serious effort to stop. This involved taping my mouth most of the time. I still tape now, but only at night. This has actually worked quite quickly. But for awhile, even with taping, I was still getting awakened in the middle of the night with a lot of air trying to escape from my mouth. I think I have UARS, so I have no idea what my pressure should be. I had the lower set to 4 and upper to 10. So, just on a hunch, I set the lower pressure to 6. This worked and now I can sleep through the night without massive amounts of air coming into my mouth. SOO HAPPY - it is a good start. Once I am able to sleep well regularly this way, I plan to inch up the pressure gradually.

I have a couple of questions. If my machine was trying to increase my pressure in the middle of the night, and now it cannot because I set the upper pressure to 6, does this mean that whatever events my machine was trying to take care of, are happening anyway because I set the pressure to only 6? See, I have no idea what is happening when I sleep, but only that something not so good is happening. My ENT suspects it too and thinks my decision to use APAP is a good one. He says people with a face shaped like mine often have breathing problems at night.

Brings me to the second question. Can someone tell me how to start getting some sleep data from my machine? None of the doc I got with the machine is useful for this. I am at the point where I can sleep long enough with my machine to try to see what might be happening at night. I also think I read here that this machine can be used to diagnose a sleep problem. I don't think I have OSA, but would like to know for sure. If so, where can I find the instructions?

I live in Panama, the doctors don't know almost anything about CPAP.

Use SleepyHead...for software data
https://sleep.tnet.com/equipment

PEF wrote: If my machine was trying to increase my pressure in the middle of the night, and now it cannot because I set the upper pressure to 6, does this mean that whatever events my machine was trying to take care of, are happening anyway because I set the pressure to only 6?

Yes, it is possible that the events that needed more than 6 cm will happen anyway with the machine not being able to go higher.
But these machines sometimes go higher for reasons that might not be a critical reason when compared to unwanted problems associated with going higher. Meaning sometimes it goes higher in response to snores and flow limitations that are relatively minor and don't cause as much of a problem as the higher pressures cause. In other words sometimes we have to make compromises.
If you do primarily have UARS and not OSA the data from the machine and software may not be the best guideline because often UARS patients have fairly low AHI and that's the primary marker for effective therapy.

You are also going to have to rely a lot on how you feel....probably more than someone like myself who has plain ordinary OSA.

Get the software though...I am particularly interested in the flow limitation graphs in your situation.
Oh..awake breathing has to be ignored...only asleep breathing matters when evaluating therapy.
Awake breathing often will fool the machine into flagging some sort of apnea event while awake and it isn't a real event.

OK, Pugsy, thanks. Working on getting the software downloaded.