New, Severe, Really Concerned

You may have misunderstood - your max pressure setting is 18 (and could possibly be moved to 20, which is standard), but it's the min. setting that 'does the work'. It will move up and down through the night responding to events when necessary, though moving to e.g. 18 (or 15 etc) except for a particular event is less likely. What you want to do is keep the new min. setting of 8 for a few nights to see where it usually tops up (e.g. 10 or 12 or ???) and does not really go much below that, you can set it (the min.) 1-2 cms below that number, still leaving the max setting where it is. Then post again in a couple of days to show us that (ideally) you've found a setting that brings your AHI down to a good place, but if not, post again for more advice.

Go into the clinical setup menu area and check to see if EZ-Start is turned on (I suspect it is) and turn it off. That's what is keeping your machine from doing what it needs to be doing. It's limiting the machine from auto adjusting your pressures. Dumbest idea to have this setting confuse people.

Do you know how to get into the clinical setup menu area and change the settings? If not, go here and request the clinical/provider manual for your machine as it explains how to get into the setup menu area...some button pushing combos.
It has some other useful information as well.
https://www.apneaboard.com/adjust-cpap- ... tup-manual

For everyone telling him to increase the minimum pressure....wait before advising that to be done until we see exactly what the machine will do at the current minimum when EZ-Start isn't limiting things. His current minimum might do a better job than we think if the machine didn't have its hands tied with EZ-Start.

Thank you everyone.

I don’t remember if the EZ start was on or off but it is off now. But I did change from 6 to 8 min.

My control now looks like this:
I was able to sleep for 45 more mins and my AHI definitely went down. No where close to where it “should” be yet. I will attempt to go to sleep again and post the results from Oscar later.

EZ Start was definitely on. I could tell by what the settings were showing and what the machine was doing.

Let's see what happens when the machine is setup to respond optimally.

Remember anything you see flagged when you are awake....those don't count in the evaluation process. The machine doesn't know if you are asleep or not because it only measures air flow.
Our awake/semi awake breathing is often very irregular when compared to our asleep breathing but the machine only knows to flag irregular breathing so it can/will flag awake breathing by mistake.
So if it takes you an hour to go to sleep and you see a large cluster of events during that hour...none of them matter.

You must be asleep for anything to matter.

Quick question, you guys are so knowledgeable -

Has anyone ever heard of severe sleep apnea appearing out of no where one day? Besides getting it under control, that’s what the doctor are concerned about now - the suddenness.

NewToSleepApnea wrote: ↑

Sun May 10, 2020 10:24 am

Quick question, you guys are so knowledgeable -

Has anyone ever heard of severe sleep apnea appearing out of no where one day? Besides getting it under control, that’s what the doctor are concerned about now - the suddenness.

well the questions you need to ask yourself is what symptoms are/were you experiencing? Are they related to sleep apnea? Gotta be proactive with yourself.

As for me, I never knew I had it. Just like high cholesterol... I was high risk, just like Apnea.... didn't know it until I had blood work done. As far as apnea... I went to a Dr. about other things I was experiencing for years but didn't realize they were related to apnea. The Dr. asked me If I snored, and set me up for a sleep study. Other symptoms were tired during the day after sleeping all night, irritated, agitated, concentration, problem solving, memory issues.

The most my new primary Dr. made me do was come in for a physical, and he found I was high risk cholesterol, and checked the normal things during a physical, but he never asked me anything else? Funny thing is his brother is my Neurologist ! You would think he would asked me other questions that would led me down the road I'm on now ! The Dr. I had before this one was just a troubleshooter... this Dr, is a wellness Dr.... well to a point.. get the idea?

My wife prodded me to get a Neurological eval for years !! I shoulda listened... but I was too proud..until one day I just got fed up of dealing with myself and the stupid things I was doing at the workplace. Getting fired over stupid petty crap

I would suspect it was not all that "sudden", but due to not diagnosing it earlier;
"somebody" is trying to cover their incompetent backside.

I’ve heard a lot of stories of people who had symptoms or didn’t realize they had it.

I never had any symptoms that I noticed. Very easy to fall asleep and stay asleep. No tiredness throughout the day. Only need 5/6 hours of sleep to feel good. Almost any position.

In 1 day it changed where I couldn’t sleep in any position without gasping for air and O2 Desaturation. It was even after I lost 15lbs.

chunkyfrog wrote: ↑

Sun May 10, 2020 10:44 am

I would suspect it was not all that "sudden", but due to not diagnosing it earlier;
"somebody" is trying to cover their incompetent backside.

I go along with that !!

I suppose it wouldn't be physically impossible for something to cause a drastic change in the body that might precipitate some sort of apnea manifesting itself seemingly overnight but there would most likely be several sets of circumstances involved.
Example....central sleep apnea can be rather sudden if a person was put on some sort of medication that suppressed respiration and maybe they were already sort of borderline in that area anyway....add in the meds and the scales are tipped.
Head trauma is another rather sudden cause sometimes.

For obstructive sleep apnea suddenly tipping the scales...maybe again some medications or drastic changes in muscle tissue could maybe be a factor but it is unusual. Most of the time it's a gradual thing and then sometimes the symptoms pile up and boom it seems like it happened all of the sudden but maybe something just happened that was that proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
To know for sure a person would have to have had a sleep study last week that was entirely negative and then this week have a positive severe result for some reason.

We don't know for sure....is it impossible...nothing is impossible but it certainly isn't probable that OSA just turns severe overnight.
Central sleep apnea though...there are some definite changes that could precipitate and over night marked change.

Changes in something would be involved though. Something tipped the scales and was that last straw.

If I were a doctor, I would look into a degenerative nerve or muscle disease.
As a patient, I would want to eliminate these possibilities--MS, Lou Gehrig's, etc.
Any one of those could seemingly present rapidly as symptoms progress beyond more noticeable areas.

Went back to my sleep doctor, who honestly didn’t come across like he knew about some of the settings on the machine and was surprised it didn’t work. He didn’t initially believe me that it was still in the 40s. He finally admitted that I may have complex / central sleep apnea and wants to do a overnight sleep lab.

So I’ve turn it off easy start, Increased the min. Pressure to 8 and hopefully it will be much better. I’ll post the Oscar data results in the morning.

If it doesn’t end up well, I’ll be going into an overnight sleep lab.

Maybe I had some symptoms and didn’t notice. I also was a chewing tobacco user and cannabis smoker at night. Since this started I have stopped and am done with them. I’m sure it didn’t help.

Thank you to everyone, been a huge help.

Ok, will see what's what in the a.m., but thanks for the latest info - I can only assume cannabis would have quite an effect on things depending how much you used and what time of day, etc... and now you've stopped, things might look a lot different now once you get organized .

Hey guys - last night was so much better. I still do not feel like myself but I do not feel like a total zombie for the first time since this started 12 days ago. I know 10 AHI isnt great and I really hope to get it lower, but it feels much better than 45. Thank you for your help, this forum has been the most helpful aspect, including all Drs, so far.

Two Qs
1 - The machine felt like it was pulsing when I was first trying to go to sleep. I changed the flex to A flex and it seemed to fix it. Is that common?

2 - Looking at other peoples graphs, the pressure on mine seems so much lower. Is that something the machine will do for me?

Oscar data 5-11-20

Yes, it's normal for the Flex to feel a bit weird depending on the setting. Flex adjusts based on your air flow and sometimes people do better with a different flex setting. No big deal. I tell people to use whatever simply feels more comfortable. It strictly a comfort setting.

I also preferred A Flex over C Flex but I know others who like C Flex better. The difference is minor but for some people it is noticeable.

Did you spend much time awake with the mask and machine on? Especially the first 2 sleep sessions...did you ever go to sleep that first short session?