I feel better without my CPAP!

Hello everybody new to this forum, trying to find some answers. I am 30 yrs old and was diagnosed with apnea in 2008 and have been wearing a cpap prettymuch since then. I am currently using the resmed S9 and my AHI levels are usually lower than 1 everyday.

I guess I am trying to figure out if say my AHI was .9 the night before, is that the level after the cpap correction or does the cpap make my AHI 0?

Also, I feel blah in the morning after I wear my cpap. I wear it religously unless I am camping or something but once a while I will miss a night and wake up the next day and feel normal. When I first started wearing one I felt great in the morning and my head would be in the clouds if I didnt wear it but now it seems like its the opposite. Any thoughts?

I know that sleep apnea usually doesnt go away but I eat super healthy now, drink less and am not overweight so maybe wondering if Im better off without it and say that I didnt have sleep apnea to wear I needed a mask, would there be any harm in wearing one?

TIA, I will be doing a lot of reading on here to better understand sleep apnea.

you could try the machine at its lowest setting - 4 i guess - and see what your ahi is. If your ahi remains low, it might be worth having your apnea retested.

.9 is your AHI with therapy. The machine has no way to measure events that did not occur.

You're not the only one to report that they feel better without CPAP. You might try to search out
some of those posts.

You also might want to consider (with your doctor) scheduling another sleep study to see what your
unteated AHI is. Or you could turn the pressure setting of your machine down and see if your AHI rises.

I don't believe that CPAP therapy can have significant negative results in otherwise healty
people who have no need for it, but I'm not doctor.

I'm sure others will chime in about this.

My pressure has been at 7 up until recently when I had to do a yearly sleep test (FAA required) and they upped it to 9 and I started using the S9 instead of S8. I also have the full face quattro FX i believe because my jaw relaxes so much when I sleep that I breath through my mouth.

If you no longer need CPAP, a sleep study will establish that. I assume the FAA will require it as well (I hope). If your sleep study was very recent, it sounds like it didn't establish that you don't need CPAP, but rather that you do. If that's the case, maybe your pressures need tweaking if you used to feel good after CPAP use and now you don't. Data from your machine would be useful.

Are your leaks under control? Significant leaks can stop the machine from sensing events.

And I hope I don't need to type this, but I wouldn't do any experimenting on nights before
going to your FAA-related job.

If you are not feeling right, apnea may not be the reason.
I suggest you run your symptoms by your physician.
It could very well be something else.
Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean you can fix everything with it.

c03camson wrote:Hello everybody new to this forum, trying to find some answers. I am 30 yrs old and was diagnosed with apnea in 2008 and have been wearing a cpap prettymuch since then. I am currently using the resmed S9 and my AHI levels are usually lower than 1 everyday.

I guess I am trying to figure out if say my AHI was .9 the night before, is that the level after the cpap correction or does the cpap make my AHI 0?

Also, I feel blah in the morning after I wear my cpap. I wear it religously unless I am camping or something but once a while I will miss a night and wake up the next day and feel normal. When I first started wearing one I felt great in the morning and my head would be in the clouds if I didnt wear it but now it seems like its the opposite. Any thoughts?

I know that sleep apnea usually doesnt go away but I eat super healthy now, drink less and am not overweight so maybe wondering if Im better off without it and say that I didnt have sleep apnea to wear I needed a mask, would there be any harm in wearing one?

TIA, I will be doing a lot of reading on here to better understand sleep apnea.

Hi c03camson!

In about a year my pressure needs went from 15 cm/H2O down to 8 cm/H2O. I moved to a much less stress city, learned to breath better, continued with good diet and exercise (very close to my 10,000 steps a day last summer).

This summer I hope to need even less pressure.

Yet even with that less pressure I found myself needing to use EERS[1] to deal with unstable breathing caused by the additional stress of Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) and the pressure of CPAP. I hope I can eventually be rid of CPAP or at least see much better therapies in the future[2].

Have a great weekend!

Todzo

[1]: Gilmartin G, McGeehan B, Vigneault K, Daly RW, Manento M, Weiss JW, Thomas RJ.
Treatment of positive airway pressure treatment-associated respiratory instability with enhanced expiratory rebreathing space (EERS).
Source: J Clin Sleep Med. 2010 Dec 15;6(6):529-38. Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA.
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21206741

[2]: Dynamic CO2 therapy in periodic breathing: a modeling study to determine optimal timing and dosage regimes
Yoseph Mebrate, Keith Willson, Charlotte H. Manisty, Resham Baruah, Jamil Mayet, Alun D. Hughes, Kim H. Parker and Darrel P. Francis
J Appl Physiol 107:696-706, 2009. First published 23 July 2009; doi: 10.1152/japplphysiol.90308.2008
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19628721

jdm2857 wrote:Are your leaks under control? Significant leaks can stop the machine from sensing events.

And I hope I don't need to type this, but I wouldn't do any experimenting on nights before
going to your FAA-related job.

If my mask was leaking wouldn't the CPAP tell me that? Whenever I look at the data the next morning I always get the smiley face saying the mask fit was good.

c03camson wrote:If my mask was leaking wouldn't the CPAP tell me that? Whenever I look at the data the next morning I always get the smiley face saying the mask fit was good.

ResMed S9 Mr Smiley? All he needs to be smiling is for you to spend 75% of the night out of large leak territory (24 L/min is the beginning of large leak territory for the S9).
Though I would imagine your leak line looks nothing like mine...this was freak night..brand new nasal pillow mask headgear and I didn't have it tightened enough.
Just thought I would mention it because sometimes Mr Smiley lies.
Take a look at this leak line....Mr Smiley was still smiling. How...I don't know but maybe I squeaked by with 76% of the night just barely being under 24 L/min. My sleep quality was just as bad as this looked. Fought leaks all night long.

Very interesting. Thanks everybody for the replys so far. I'm going to install that SD card in my computer and check it out.

fwiw, I was on cpap for a little over a yr... then I had to leave it. Was another yr before any of the most obvoius symptoms (major energy level drop, daily headaches, loss of short memory) reappeared

I'd suggest seeing your doctor. There may be other reasons for your tiredness if your OSA is controlled.

jdm2857 wrote:Are your leaks under control? Significant leaks can stop the machine from sensing events.

And I hope I don't need to type this, but I wouldn't do any experimenting on nights before
going to your FAA-related job.

I tightened my mask quite a bit to see how that would work and to my surprise the AHI went up to between 1.5 and 2.5 but I am feeling much better this week. So maybe you are right, I had my mask too loose and it was not sensing all the events but it was still good enough to not cause the machine to say the mask fit was leaking.

Hopefully this was the issue. I feel much better this week. Thanks for all the replys everybody.

Please fill in your equipment on your profile so we don't have to keep searching for what equipment you're using. In particular, which S9 do you have? It should say something like Elite or AutoSet next to the power button.