Albino's Therapy Thread

[palerider]

Looking like I may still need to bump up my minimum pressure to 8.5 or 9 but I want take a week or two to adjust to the new mask first. Thoughts?

The sooner you raise the minimum pressure, the sooner you'll have less events... 9 or 10, I'd skip the half steps.

[Albino_Mexican]

The sooner you raise the minimum pressure, the sooner you'll have less events... 9 or 10, I'd skip the half steps.

Makes sense; thanks.

[Albino_Mexican]

Here's last night's data. I still woke up several times starting to my knowledge at 3am so there is probably some SWJ in there but a much better night than the one before. Let me know if drilling down to a specific area would be helpful; otherwise I think I'll be bumping up the minimum pressure to 9 shortly.

[Albino_Mexican]

Set my minimum pressure to 9 last night and I'm pretty happy with the result. Likely a lot of the flagged CAs are SWJ; when I have time later today I'll post some zoomed graphs just to confirm with the experts.

[Albino_Mexican]

Some zoomed in graphs which I think contain SWJ. Would the resident experts mind having a look and offer a second opinion? Thanks.

[palerider]

Those centrals look post arousal to me.

*HOWEVER*, based on how much 'periodic breathing' there is, I'd try lowering the flex setting, and see if that helps things.

[Pugsy]

I agree with PR...they look post arousal to me...but the PB flagged stuff is ugly and way too much of it.
Can you turn Flex off for one night and just see what happens? No other changes...just turn Flex off.

[Albino_Mexican]

Those centrals look post arousal to me.

*HOWEVER*, based on how much 'periodic breathing' there is, I'd try lowering the flex setting, and see if that helps things.

I agree with PR...they look post arousal to me...but the PB flagged stuff is ugly and way too much of it.
Can you turn Flex off for one night and just see what happens? No other changes...just turn Flex off.

Thanks PR and Pugsy! Yes I can. It's going to be a short night for me tonight as I have to be up really early to catch a flight and I will be travelling for the next 2 days. I'll report back when I'm settled in my new location and have slept a few nights without flex.

[Albino_Mexican]

Alright. So I tried to sleep without flex and it did not go well so as you can see, I turned flex back on at level 2 partially through the night just so I could get some sleep. I'm not saying I won't try again in the future but right now I just feel more comfortable and get more sleep with flex on but I have reduced back to the original setting of 1. The following nights were much better and yielded my best AHI result yet; unfortunately I still sleep like crap so even those numbers include a lot of SWJ so they are inflated. Am I making a foolish decision to want to stick with 9/20 & flex 1 for a while to see if my brain adapts and my overall sleep improves? Stats for the last few nights; I appreciate your input.

[Pugsy]

We gotta get the sleep first. Perfect numbers don't mean squat if you aren't sleeping.

I vote for sticking with what lets you sleep decently...and the AHI isn't all that horrible.
Roughly half of it is CA anyway...real or not...can't do anything about it.
Remove the CA index from the AHI...and it's actually a fairly low AHI and I would take it if it were mine and I slept halfway decently and trying to reduce it caused more problems than it fixed.

Have you ever tried a minimum of 9.5 or 10.0 and using whatever Flex just feels better?
That's what I did...I liked Flex and turned if off one night...disastrous results and I never wanted to do that again.
So I just increased the minimum a little to break up the REM clusters I was seeing. I was happy with an AHI of 1 to 3 that was OAs and hyponeas as long as I slept decently.

[Albino_Mexican]

We gotta get the sleep first. Perfect numbers don't mean squat if you aren't sleeping.

I vote for sticking with what lets you sleep decently...and the AHI isn't all that horrible.
Roughly half of it is CA anyway...real or not...can't do anything about it.
Remove the CA index from the AHI...and it's actually a fairly low AHI and I would take it if it were mine and I slept halfway decently and trying to reduce it caused more problems than it fixed.

Have you ever tried a minimum of 9.5 or 10.0 and using whatever Flex just feels better?
That's what I did...I liked Flex and turned if off one night...disastrous results and I never wanted to do that again.
So I just increased the minimum a little to break up the REM clusters I was seeing. I was happy with an AHI of 1 to 3 that was OAs and hyponeas as long as I slept decently.

I have not tried 9.5 or 10 yet but I'm more open to that than giving up flex completely. I think I"ll leave it as is for now until I get some consistency and then tweak it up as you suggested. I have an added frustration right now in that the heat in my bedroom is a steam radiant heater and turning it down with the valve is more of an art than science so I keep tweaking it every night trying to bring the temp down....and...the ambient humidity is extremely low so today I added a room humidifier so maybe my APAP reservoir won't be bone dry and my sinuses won't be bleeding by morning.

[Albino_Mexican]

Any idea what would cause Flow Rate graph data to be missing? In both cases I wore the mask and the machine was on for the entire time.

[Pugsy]

Either the SD card got unseated from the slot somehow or the data file got corrupted and SH can't read it.

The SD card must be in the slot when the machine is in use for it to write the flow rate data directly to the SD card.
So maybe something bumped the SD card and made it sort of pop out just a little....or the data files got messed up.

Looks like it started the flow rate very breifly and then quit...and only 1 sleep session...so it is a bit of a mystery.

[Albino_Mexican]

So the last 3 nights the machine has been behaving strangely compared to normal. I have seen a huge increase in VS2 and what feels like runaway pressure increases that even after a reset to my set pressure of 10 using the ramp button, the pressure immediately starts to climb. The first screenshot is what is fairly normal for me but the pressure may on occasion briefly rise to 11 or 12 a few times during any given night. The next 3 screenshots are what I'm concerned about. Any idea what might be causing this?

P.S. @Pugsy, haven't had a reoccurrence of the mysterious gap so not sure what happened there.

[Albino_Mexican]

The 3 that I'm concerned about.