masks

My husband has a problem using his CPAP machine and he can't seem to be able to stay asleep. Even with sleeping pills and putting the machine under the bed he still wakes up after about an hour. He is using the Resmed VPAP that he has used with both a regular mask and pillow mask. Has anyone tried the "CPAP Pro"? I saw it on line but wondered what people thought of it and not just the ones that are on the web site.
Thanks

Search using cpappro. All one word. I haven't heard much good about this mask. You should also click on the yellow light bulb at the top of the page. Lots of great info there.

Brenda

billswife wrote:My husband has a problem using his CPAP machine and he can't seem to be able to stay asleep. Even with sleeping pills and putting the machine under the bed he still wakes up after about an hour.

It sounds like your husband is getting to sleep OK and waking up abruptly an hour later. If that is the case (and especially if he is using a CPAP rather then an APAP) the problem is probably that his treatment pressure setting is too low. When he gets deep in his sleep cycle he will be much more relaxed than most of us get in our titration sleep study, and he may be experiencing a full blown apnea. When you stop breathing because your airway collapses, your body's response is to shoot you full of adrenaline. This wakes you up, starts you breathing again, and often makes it tough to get back to sleep.

The good news is that this is easy to fix. All you should have to do is to increase the treatment pressure setting on your CPAP. (This is not the same as the ramp setting and there will be a specific set of button presses that you will need to perform to put the machine into setup mode to change it. I am sure you can find an old post with this information for your machine. IF I am right about your problem, increasing your husbands pressure by a couple of cm should fix the problem.

Now again it is possible that I misunderstand the situation. It is normal for new CPAP users to have trouble getting to sleep because the mask and the pressure feel weird, or because the mask is uncomfortable, or because they are worried about leaks and constantly fighting the adjustments. It is also normal to have the wrong size mask (I use that generically - it is true for all types of interfaces) and to experience soreness in addition to leaks. All of this would make it hard to sleep at all, and hard to sleep all night.

If any of that is true then he is (just like most of us) still in the process of finding - and getting used to - a mask that works for him.

But if his problem is a sudden jolt of wakefulness after an hour of good sleep - with no obvious soreness, or leaking (or rainout ...) then I would be willing to bet he is still experiencing apnea. This is actually a good thing because it is relatively easy to increase the pressure on any XPAP.

Finding a mask that works... that can take time!