Diamondminek wrote:so i would just like those in the know to have a look at my screenshots, and see if there is anything i should be worried about? or arguments for keeping a data capable machine, or arguments for me having apap vs cpap. the theory is a check up every two years - i want to keep an effective eye on my self in the mean time!
The best argument that I think you can make for keeping the autoset is based on what you say here:
i still feel tired and like i need a nap although not as bad as before - but on better days i do feel like i have energy to actually do things again, im manging to sleep longer - before i was waking early in the morning, im able to stay up later at night without a massive effort, housework is a bit easier to stay on top of - the little things have gotten better.
You are feeling better with the S9 Autoset than you did with the previous machine. Your are sleeping longer with the S9 Autoset than you did with the previous machine. And you want to be an active participant in the treatment of your OSA and you just plain want to keep the S9 Autoset both for its data and for its flexibility: You don't have to have the machine swapped out when there's a question about whether there's something wrong with your therapy.
Most doctors will listen to those first two reasons. Many may be willing to listen the third one, but some won't like that third one at all.
You also ask:
so i would just like those in the know to have a look at my screenshots, and see if there is anything i should be worried about?
The data from the days you post all seem to indicate that therapy is working pretty well in the sense of preventing the apneas and hypopneas from occurring. And that's the first step towards getting PAP therapy optimized so that you can learn to sleep well with the hose on your nose.
I do agree with ChicagoGranny about the min pressure setting: If you get to keep this machine, that min pressure setting should be increased.
You also write:
my cpap was set to a pressure just over 14 - 7 of the 19 nights the 95% (which the clinic used to get the 14) is 15 or higher, with a few nights in the high 14s. so would i be right saying assuming this is how ive been sleeping for the last few month, i havent been having effective treatment?
It's possible that 14cm was low enough to let enough events through to cause some problems with undertreated OSA. The fact that your original titration was for 14cm and the machine is reporting a 95% of 15 or higher indicates that if you get to keep the S9 Autoset, you probably ought to set the min pressure up around 12cm---if getting to sleep with that much pressure is not problematic for you.
i see some leaks, but other than times the hose disconnects i guess they dont bother me?
Your leaks are all below the Redline of 24 L/min that Resmed uses to define an official Large Leak. Most of the time your largest leak is well below the Redline. So from a therapy point of view, your leaks are small enough and/or short enough to be ignored. So the real question is:
Do the leaks wake you up or otherwise disturb your sleep? If they're waking you up, you need to deal with them. You need to deal with anything that's interfering with getting a good night's sleep. If they're not waking you up, then you can most likely ignore them unless there is some other kind of evidence that they're interfering with your sleep. For example, if you are frequently waking up with a very dry mouth on the nights where you have long periods of minor leaks, you might be more comfortable addressing the leaks.
and i realise i look like im waking up more than i should? i try only to reset the machine if i really feel the need to.
All kinds of things can cause sleep maintenance insomnia. With an APAP, the pressure changes can cause some people to wake up more than they should. A much tighter pressure range usually addresses that problem.
And then it simply takes some people a lot longer to start sleeping soundly with a six foot hose attached to their nose. (It took me over a year and a whole lot of hard work before I felt like I finally had a handle on the CPAP-induced insomnia.)
And you also have to factor in your age and other medical conditions. As most people age, their sleep becomes more fractured--i.e. the older you are the more likely you are to have multiple wakes at night. And many medical conditions and drugs can cause problems with staying asleep all night long.
Finally, it's also important to remember that even the people with the healthiest sleep still may wake up briefly after every REM cycle. It's just that they don't remember those wakes because as soon as they wake up and establish that there's nothing wrong in their surroundings, they go right back asleep. And because the wake lasts less than 5 minutes, they don't remember it in the morning.
Since you don't always turn the machine OFF and back ON when you wake up, can you give us an idea of how many times you think you are waking up in a typical night?
Finally you write:
i dont think the number of centrals is anything to worry about? and on some of the graphs, a few of them line up with big leaks, which i understand means they dont actually represent a central?
Even on your worst nights you don't have enough CAs to worry about. Moreover, even on the worst nights, those CAs are isolated---i.e. you don't have clusters of a whole bunch of them happening over a very short time.
They don't seem to line up with your largest leaks to me. There may be a very weak correlation to times close to the high pressure peaks, but even then, they seem just as likely to occur after the pressure has started to decrease. My guess is that some of them may be post-arousal CAs that are occurring as you get back to a sound sleep. And in that case, they might not even count as a "real" CA if they were seen during an in-lab sleep study.
In other words, if I were you, I wouldn't worry about the CAs unless the number of them increases quite drastically.
