My name is Alex and I am a 38 year old Air Force vet and Lockheed Martin engineer, and recently diagnosed with sleep apnea (57.1 AHI
). I am surely glad I found this board and look forward to getting my therapy dialed in and hopefully beat this thing. A little history...I had noticed for the last few years a creeping weight gain and blood pressure increase that I couldn't reverse despite eating healthy and weightlifting religiously. My wife complained of my snoring occasionally, but nothing too crazy. I always felt like I got a good night's rest and would usually sleep through the night and outside of occasional afternoon tiredness, never had the debilitating fatigue that I see so many people w/ apnea suffering from. Heck, I would usually weightlift at 7-8pm and would usually crush it.
That was up until 2 months ago, when I started waking up almost every night about 2-3 hours after falling asleep. I would wake up with a fast heart beat almost always right in the middle of a dream, usually with a splitting headache. It would take me hours to get back to sleep. After weeks of that I got my sleep study done and was diagnosed. My guess is I've had this apnea for awhile which has contributed to my aforementioned issues, and it has gotten worse to the point where I now and noticing it.
I've now been on my CPAP for a week or so, and my daily report from the ResMed machine and MyAir app are showing ~1 AHI per hour, which is great. However, I am still waking up most nights within 2-3 hours of falling asleep with the same symptoms as before. After some research it seems my apnea is still showing itself during peak REM. I have an Auto CPAP currently set between 8 and 15 cm. Is it possible that the machine's algorithm is not fast enough to up the pressure when I hit that point in my sleep cycle? I am surprised that my AHI is reading so low despite the fact that I am still getting woken up.
Any ideas or suggestions? I will provide an OSCAR printout in a few days when my SD reader comes in. Thank you so much.
