First night with CPAP completed!

[rionoirble]

After sleeping with the head of my bed at about a 60 degree angle for the last few months as my gasping during sleep was getting progressively worse, I was finally able to sleep flat on my back for most of the night last night! I woke up from REM sleep once with my machine screaming at me and trying to drown me in oxygen which was actually kind of funny, but I took a big breath and went back to sleep. I did wake up naturally about halfway through the night and felt wide awake and had a really hard time going back to sleep for nearly two hours, but that happened frequently before CPAP due to stress. I'm hoping the more restful sleep I get the less anxiety I will have about going to bed and I will finally be able to sleep through the night.

I have to say that when my machine first arrived and I tried on the mask I didn't think there was any way I was going to be comfortable with it on, but I did some work on the computer for a few hours using the machine and after that I almost hated to take it off, it felt so much easier to breath even working on my computer. lol

Oh and as an added bonus, I'm pretty sure the heated humidified and filtered air is responsible for clearing up the runny nose I've had for two weeks.

Edit: Going to try to find a SD card laying around here before I go to bed so I can get setup with sleepyhead. This myAir air app really shows you absolutely nothing.

[zonker]

Edit: Going to try to find a SD card laying around here before I go to bed so I can get setup with sleepyhead. This myAir air app really shows you absolutely nothing.

snoopy-dance.gif

very good! yup, folks here aren't all that keen on my air. so, once you get that sleepyhead rolling, please come back to this thread to post your screenshots.

good luck!

[palerider]

Edit: Going to try to find a SD card laying around here before I go to bed so I can get setup with sleepyhead. This myAir air app really shows you absolutely nothing.

Yup, all myair is good for is seeing that nothing much has changed... (which you can get just glancing at the front of the machine)... but it's completely useless when trying to figure out what's wrong, and how to make things better.

[D.H.]

Just a small point; a CPAP does not deliver oxygen, just room air with no change in oxygen content. It is just delivered at a higher pressure than the air in the room.

[rionoirble]

Ok so before anyone looks at this and says I don't need CPAP, as I've mentioned before my apnea is REM-associated sleep apnea. So my overall AHI is low to start with. That means I had to cover my costs myself, even though my doc signed off on the machine. I've included an image of my sleep tracker which is pretty accurate for showing REM stages, which are depicted by the yellow bars. Unfortunately you can't see the exact times without clicking on them, but I did confirm that my pressure increases were exclusively happening during those periods last night.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone for the information on this forum. Using sleepyhead and reading about EPR, I decided to go at it without EPR last night since my pressures are so low anyway and made a small change to my minimum and had a perfect night! I know my situation isn't so complicated, but I can't tell you the last time I slept 6 hours straight without waking up gasping for air multiple times, and even that was disrupting my sleep so bad that I sought out CPAP - I can only imagine what some of you are struggling with.

[Pugsy]

Good job. Congratulations.
And I do understand about REM dependent OSA. My own isn’t quite like yours but similar.
In non REM sleep my AHI was around 12 but in REM it was 53 per hour. Needless to say I never got much REM before I started Cpap because I would start having those events and promptly wake up.

[djams]

Hey rionoirble - I've got the SleepTracker as well. It's good to hear that you've noticed the correlation between pressure increases (suspected REM) and SleepTracker REM. Anything like this just improves my confidence in the accuracy of the system, which the company behind it claims is 95% when compared with PSG.

I've had mine since November and my confidence in the accuracy is high now. I choose to believe it. Big revelation for me over this time is that I've discovered that deep sleep is what makes the big difference in how I feel during the day. I always thought it was REM sleep that made the difference. Also, my body/brain prioritizes deep sleep, they get deep sleep out of the way first at the beginning of the night. Although, since I've been using the Bleep Dreamport, I'm starting to see deep sleep cylcles throughout the night recently.

Anyways, I really like this smartbed. No charging, don't have to wear anything just get into bed and look at your report in the morning. Suits my lazy lifestyle well!

Glad to have someone here to talk to about it.

[rionoirble]

In non REM sleep my AHI was around 12 but in REM it was 53 per hour.

Wow that's quite a jump! When I did my home sleep test mine wasn't quite that much, but I also did the test with the head of the bed elevated over 45 degrees because I just couldn't handle laying flat anymore, which I'm sure lowered it a bit.

Hey rionoirble - I've got the SleepTracker as well. It's good to hear that you've noticed the correlation between pressure increases (suspected REM) and SleepTracker REM. Anything like this just improves my confidence in the accuracy of the system, which the company behind it claims is 95% when compared with PSG.

I've been noting the times when I wake up from REM for a while and then comparing it to my sleep reports and they've always lined up. I'm curious how it distinguishes light sleep from deep sleep, there never seems to be a big difference between HR and RR at those times, but it does feel pretty accurate in the sense that I can pretty much tell what my score is going to be just based on how refreshed I feel.

[rionoirble]

Bumped my minimum up one more notch to 6 and I think I've just about found my perfect number to get rid of almost all the little blips. I feel great today!

I still feel like I'm having a major issue with humidity though. For the first 75% of the night I'm pretty much fine, but then I've woken up a few nights around 3ish with my mouth so dry it felt like it was just sandpaper all the way down to my lungs. That might be what that big pressure event is on this chart - I didn't really pay attention to the time I just chugged some water and went back to sleep. I've mostly had the climate control on auto. Last night I tried to set it manually and it was even worse. I'm using a F20, sizing chart says I'm using the right size, I don't really get a lot of leakage so I don't think I'm losing humidity that way. Heated tubing. We have a humidifier in the room which usually says the ambient humidity is around 42%, which is pretty good because sometimes it's in the 30s in the winter months which is awful even without CPAP. It's hard to get the room humidity up much more until it warms up outside. Am I missing something?

Maybe I'll just try max humidity and mess around with the temp a little bit? I've always struggled a bit with dry mouth at night so this isn't exactly abnormal for me - but it hasn't been quite as bad as it is with the machine going.

[Pugsy]

The humidifier wasn't designed to hydrate the oral cavity. It was designed to hydrate the nasal cavity which is quite a bit smaller.
Sometimes people just get dry mouth easier than others and when you add in mouth breathing even with a full face mask and machine set to maximum humidity it simply isn't enough to ward off the dry mouth.
This is why you see so many full face mask users using some sort of oral hydrating product...you know those Biotene type of OTC products designed to help keep the mouth not so dry.

People even get dry mouth and they don't necessarily do much mouth breathing either. It just happens...medication side effects or just the way their bodies are.

[rionoirble]

The humidifier wasn't designed to hydrate the oral cavity. It was designed to hydrate the nasal cavity which is quite a bit smaller.
Sometimes people just get dry mouth easier than others and when you add in mouth breathing even with a full face mask and machine set to maximum humidity it simply isn't enough to ward off the dry mouth.
This is why you see so many full face mask users using some sort of oral hydrating product...you know those Biotene type of OTC products designed to help keep the mouth not so dry.

People even get dry mouth and they don't necessarily do much mouth breathing either. It just happens...medication side effects or just the way their bodies are.

Thanks pugsy, I was actually thinking I would go pick up some biotene today and see if it did any good. I might have to add a nasal mask to my arsenal too to see if I have any luck. Like you say though it could just be my body - we'll see!

[zonker]

Thanks pugsy, I was actually thinking I would go pick up some biotene today and see if it did any good. I might have to add a nasal mask to my arsenal too to see if I have any luck. Like you say though it could just be my body - we'll see!

just my two cents worth, but i prefer xylimelts over biotene. i've found that biotene doesn't last as long and can be easily washed away if, like me, you are dumb enough to drink water afterwards.

as always, YMMV.

[rionoirble]

just my two cents worth, but i prefer xylimelts over biotene. i've found that biotene doesn't last as long and can be easily washed away if, like me, you are dumb enough to drink water afterwards.

as always, YMMV.

Thanks - I actually just saw those on a CPAP site and was wondering if they were any good. I'll keep those in mind too

[djams]

just my two cents worth, but i prefer xylimelts over biotene. i've found that biotene doesn't last as long and can be easily washed away if, like me, you are dumb enough to drink water afterwards.

as always, YMMV.

Thanks - I actually just saw those on a CPAP site and was wondering if they were any good. I'll keep those in mind too

FWIW - I'm with zonker. Good stuff.

[Romalin]

just my two cents worth, but i prefer xylimelts over biotene. i've found that biotene doesn't last as long and can be easily washed away if, like me, you are dumb enough to drink water afterwards.

as always, YMMV.

Thanks - I actually just saw those on a CPAP site and was wondering if they were any good. I'll keep those in mind too

I have been experiencing the same dry mouth (with the same full mask) and this information-and this thread-is exactly what i needed to see. Thanks for the tip, zonker!