Please review - first night with vauto

[cpapbro]

I was prescribed apap 7-10 with EPR 3

got a vauto machine. with some friendly advice set it up with min epap 4, max ipap 20 and PS = 3. used dream wear nasal cushion. Taped my mouth shut. started with humidity at 4. adjusted it to 2 in the middle of the night. Below are the charts.

the first gap was where i was experimenting with the machine and ran it for like 30 minutes while awake just to test it out. then later went to bed, i think the small gap right at the beginning I stopped it to adjust the ramp time as I wanted to get right into it. in the middle of the night i woke up to go to bathroom. I had some issue with a little runniness with my nose and had to stop again and blow my nose. blew my nose and adjusted humidity down.

By the time I woke up I had major congestion and drip at the same time. basically out of control drip/blowing nose/ stuffing tissue in until it finally subsided in the afternoon.

This is my first report. looks pretty good. would love any input. especially in dealing with the congestion situation from the after affects. still feel messed up about it a little, should I keep humidity higher? was it a mistak to lower it middle of night.

The leak rate stuff at the end, I think I was so congested I was exhaling out of the corners of my taped mouth a bit. and then this eventually made me get up.

[Pugsy]

Google "cpap rhinitis".
Humidity needs are highly individualized and we really don't know if you need more or less humidity but sense you used 2 for the bulk of the night and are having some rhinitis symptoms...I would try going back to 4 tonight and see how the nose feels tomorrow.
More people will need more moisture than less...so if going just by the odds...increase the setting since the setting you used was fairly low.

Me...I would snort water if I could....I pretty much have to use maximum humidity or else I get the most horrible rhinitis symptoms.
Happens even if I forget to add water and the tank runs dry during the night.
Other people don't like it or need it and instead prefer minimal added moisture or even no added moisture at all.

You can turn off the brief trial sessions if you wish...just go over to the left side below the statistics down to where you see "sessions" to turn off a session just click on it and change it from green/black to red/black. When that is done the known awake time is omitted from the data reported.
You can always go back and turn it back on if you wish.

And yes, the report looks pretty darn good. Give yourself 3 or 4 nights at these settings so you can get some solid sleep and then lets see what that pressure line looks like. Right now your main job is just adjusting to things and getting to sleep and staying asleep.

[JimW159]

Enviable results - hope they continue. One thing I would note: I have come to the conclusion that one or two bottles of NeilMed Sinus Rinse using nice warm water clears my sinuses well just prior to going to bed. Letting it drain fully seems to minimize nasal congestion and drip significantly. It is critical that the water be prepared carefully but allowed to cool to a comfortably warm temperature - by all means not too hot.

[Fetou]

Very nice AHI. If it were me, I'd gather some more data, and then if things stay the same, consider increasing minimum pressure to see if it clears up some of those flow limitations.

[palerider]

I was prescribed apap 7-10 with EPR 3

got a vauto machine. with some friendly advice set it up with min epap 4, max ipap 20 and PS = 3. used dream wear nasal cushion. Taped my mouth shut. started with humidity at 4. adjusted it to 2 in the middle of the night. Below are the charts.

the first gap was where i was experimenting with the machine and ran it for like 30 minutes while awake just to test it out. then later went to bed, i think the small gap right at the beginning I stopped it to adjust the ramp time as I wanted to get right into it. in the middle of the night i woke up to go to bathroom. I had some issue with a little runniness with my nose and had to stop again and blow my nose. blew my nose and adjusted humidity down.

By the time I woke up I had major congestion and drip at the same time. basically out of control drip/blowing nose/ stuffing tissue in until it finally subsided in the afternoon.

This is my first report. looks pretty good. would love any input. especially in dealing with the congestion situation from the after affects. still feel messed up about it a little, should I keep humidity higher? was it a mistak to lower it middle of night.

The leak rate stuff at the end, I think I was so congested I was exhaling out of the corners of my taped mouth a bit. and then this eventually made me get up.

Second the motion for minepap 6. otherwise, that's a report that many people will hate you for.... or at least be green with envy.

[zonker]

very well done, columbo!

jim has offered some advice about congestion. i'll offer a different take. you may want to try flonase. it's otc and a squirt into the nose before bed time could help you keep those nasal passages open.

good luck!

[Jas_williams]

Great results and well done, there is no need to worry about you leak results even trying to breath arround the tape

[cpapbro]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

here is night 2. I meant to adjust the min epap to 6 but forgot.

Since my nose was so bad yesterday I went to a local shop and got an airfit F20 mask to try.

I jacked up the humidity to 5 and changed the mask setting to full face. looks like i sprung a leak for a bit in the night. I do remember waking up for a sec and adjusting it/tightening it.

nose and mouth WAY better. I'm not sure if I'm just like catching a cold or its allergy time down here in FL but yesterday sucked all day with the nose so much that it made me go out and buy a mask cause I couldn't imagine nose breathing only and taping my mouth. When I got up this morning my nose was great, and maybe TMI, I got up and blew my nose and everything must have been nice and moist becaue it was one of those perfect blows that totally clears you out and everythign comes out on the tissue and you feel nice and clear.

and this is the first time I haven't woken up in the middle of the night to go pee in I think forever. I can't believe that didn't happen.

Also I have some achilles issue on my right leg and usually in the morning its tight and burns a bit, especially when I get up...This morning it felt like no issue...I'm sitting here flexing it right now just kinda like amazed. Is cpap helping tendinitis a thing?

My first night charts looked good, but I did not feel good the day after or really notice anything different "feeling" than normal other than the raging nose issues which kinda stressed me out all day thinking of going to sleep last night with only a nasal mask, which is why i got the airfit f20. Today I "feel" like treatment was useful in a few different ways.

[Pugsy]

Early on in my therapy I also turned the humidity way down for one night only and it took my nose about 3 days to get back to normal.
I had a miserable 3 days.

and this is the first time I haven't woken up in the middle of the night to go pee in I think forever. I can't believe that didn't happen.

Actually this is the first sign that the cpap is doing its job. It was the first symptom that I was having that immediately went away.
Nocturia caused by sleep apnea happens because when the apnea event happens it puts stress on the heart and the heart responds by producting a stress hormone called ANP Atrial natriuretic peptide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrial_na ... ic_peptide
When this hormone makes its way in the blood system to the kidneys the kidneys go into overdrive and work harder and we all know that when the kidneys work hard...urine gets produced.

So it is working....don't expect to feel huge changes in energy levels and stuff like that until you actually have more time on the machine and your sleep quality is more solid. There's more to feeling those good numbers than just getting them.
There's hours of sleep...and quality of sleep that play a huge factor in how we feel.
Heck, it took me about a month just for the brain to quit waking me up to tell me "hey, dude...do you know there is an alien stuck on your nose blowing air up your nose"...and I had zero problems with mask fit or comfort. The brain just had come to terms with the new best friend stuck on its human's face.

The damage that sleep apnea did to your body didn't happen over night....don't expect cpap to fix all that damage in one night.

[cpapbro]

Thanks for that info.

As long as I can remember I wake up in the middle of night pee and go right back to sleep. Never thought of it as an "issue." you always see this image played out in tv or moveis as common place and I never thought twice about it.

The thing that made me ask dr about getting a sleep study was a shoulder injury that made it hard for me to lay on my side, so I was experimenting with pillow walls to barricade myself into sleeping on my back and I was busting through these walls by the morning and these were some of the worst nights of sleep I ever had. I have always snored, but never really thought about it that much (i'm mid 30's). but when I couldn't make myself sleep on my back it made me start to wonder and here we are.

So i didn't really have "bad" symptoms of anything that I was specifically trying to go after, it's just something I noticed while trying to sleep certain ways to heal my shoulder, so going into this its like "ok I have sleep apnea i guess, but I'm not sure how this is really even affecting me." So I was kinda worried about like not feeling any different about anything or doing treatment making things that weren't problems now problems (like the sinus thing) But this morning I feel great, like best I've felt waking up in a while so I'm just feeling pretty hopeful about treating an issue that didn't SEEM to be having any effects I could detect...

so yeah cpap = miracle treatment for anything "it's good for what ails ya' " lol j/k but I will be curious to see about things that may be helped by this that I didn't expect or realize that apnea may have exacerbated.

[Pugsy]

I had 2 major symptoms of sleep apnea...the nocturia and waking up with massive killer headaches. Those totally went away once I got my therapy pressure settings optimized. That alone without any improvement in anything else in my life makes using cpap worth it to me.
I was getting up to pee 3 or 4 times a night with a painfully full bladder each time. My kidneys were working very hard. Of course with so many pee breaks my sleep quality was totally in the toilet.

The other stuff that people have ...some of it I had and some I didn't. I never had the brain fog thing and energy levels weren't horrible but then I have other health issues that can affect overall energy levels and cpap can't fix those issues.
It took some time to actually notice a change in energy levels so I didn't have the overnight miracle in terms of energy.
I still sometimes need to nap...but that's because sometimes I simply don't get enough hours of sleep and that happens sometimes because of problems I have that are unrelated to sleep apnea and the machine can't fix a problem if the problem isn't sleep apnea related.
I know we want to blame all our unwanted symptoms on sleep apnea but the cold hard fact of life is sometimes stuff happens to us that isn't related to sleep apnea. Often people have unrealistic expectations of what cpap can do. Probably why some people will abandon cpap therapy saying "it doesn't work"...they expected cpap to fix a problem that it couldn't fix.

[cpapbro]

third night, airfit f20 again. woke up a couple of quick times and suspected my mask leaking a touch, but not sure. felt like I moved around more than other nights. posting overall then a couple of zooms on events to see if they're real or false flags.



Here's an event squarely in the middle of the night. this likes like a real OA, right? where verthying looks normal on flow rate then out of nowhere flatline?



another one, actual event?



and the final one that's not around the edges

[palerider]

third night, airfit f20 again. woke up a couple of quick times and suspected my mask leaking a touch, but not sure. felt like I moved around more than other nights. posting overall then a couple of zooms on events to see if they're real or false flags.

"false" centrals are a thing... False obstructives, not so much. You stop breathing, and your airway is closed. Now, it is possible to hold your breath in such a way as your airway is closed, but you're not going to do it in your sleep.

Your numbers are good, don't obsess over every individual event.

[LSAT]

With AHI running that low I would stop looking at Sleepyhead daily...look at it once a week and as PR said.."quit obsessing about every event."

[palerider]

And quit pointing, it's rude!