What has been your biggest mistake in dealing with apnea?

[G'night Gracie]

The whole procrastination, delaying behavior is true for me as well. It was 1995 when first told by a "friend with benefits" that I stopped breathing during sleep. And ya know, it didn't surprise me, because I'd suspected apnea even before then. I wonder how much O2 deprivation damage I might have avoided in all that time, had I just stepped up.

[Sir NoddinOff]

Simply waiting until I was in my sixties. Now that I have the advantage of hindsight, it's easy to see, but in th early days I simply wrote it off to a bad mattress, a noisy environment, too much stress, too much coffee... you name it. Oh well, we do what we can. Why beat yourself up over the past?

[kteague]

In actual use of the treatment, my biggest mistake was in (mis)using the ramp feature without really understanding it, but then again, I didn't have much capacity for thinking anything through at that time. But having a low ramp pressure for a long ramp period is a recipe for disaster in one who wakes a lot and has been instructed when they wake up to just hit the ramp and go back to sleep. I spent the first several months of my CPAP treatment in ramp - rarely reaching therapeutic pressure. My doctor knew my setup and situation yet seemed helpless to figure out why I was going downhill instead of getting better. One night in the chat room here and my treatment turned around and I began going the right direction. As suggested I shortened my ramp time and increased my starting ramp pressure. I was one one who dozed off immediately, and using a starting pressure of 4 was causing me to wake feeling like I was suffocating almost as soon as I dozed off. I can't be only one this is an issue for, so I try to share it from time to time in case a newbie needs to hear it.

[cobra4x4]

Biggest mistake was not getting treatment 25-30 years earlier, but then again I didn't know why I was always tired. Friends would always tell me that my snoring was horrid and very very loud.

A big Thanks goes out to my wife who when we started dating said that my sleep/snoring was not normal, she made the appointment with my doctor I said OK as long as she came along to the appointment. The doc asked what brought me in and I replied ask her as I pointed to my wife .... I said to the doctor that as far as I knew I was sleeping fine. After my wife explained what she was hearing/seeing the doc sent me for a sleep study and the rest is history.

[chunkyfrog]

I still can't believe how ignorant I was. I knew so little about apnea itself;
and had no knowledge about any of the equipment or how to advocate for my own health.
I came to this very late; it was probably within months of killing me.
What an idiot I was. I hope I've gotten smarter.

[yulcdn]

Well, my front teeth moved. The upper front teeth moved outward, forming an overbite & pushing the teeth further apart, creating large spaces between my front teeth (spaces between front 6 teeth). All this created some bone loss. If I had known a retainer would have prevented this, I would have seen an orthodontist back in 2000 when I started CPAP & got one made & wore it. I was on a very high pressure, 17cm at first, then increased to 19cm after the first few months. I've been on the APAP about a month & my pressure seems to be running around 13cm, proof that I didn't need that high a pressure, at least don't need it now.

The teeth issue is one I discussed with the dentist I was seeing at that time, he said he didn't think they were moving. It became very obvious after about a year that they were indeed moving. I switched dentist a couple of times, & both said there was nothing they could do, unless I wanted braces & they said that jokingly. Well, it turns out if I had been encouraged to actually see an orthodontist & get a retainer made the movement could have been prevented.

Basically, the orthodontist I'm seeing now is getting me ready for adult braces that are similar to Invisialign, something called Clear Correct. These are expensive, but cheaper than actual braces, that part shocked me. I'm being prepared for this with several medications due to medical conditions & the fact that I have artifical knees. I will have to be pre-post medicated each orthodontist visit with antibiotics, but before they can do that, orthodontist has to defer to my oncologist so that she can get several of my blood numbers in line to be able to take the antibiotics. The process is harder for me, since I have Lymphoma & other medical conditions, but most of my drs are being supportive.



My endocrinologist is kind of being shi**y but I think he has dentures & wanted me to go the easy route - just pull all my front teeth & get a bridge. I'm NOT doing that.

In order to prevent problems with your teeth, watch carefully for movement, there is pressure going into your nose and mouth (even with a nasal mask - I've worn all nasal masks, never FF) and that pressure can cause things to move around. It did in my case, possibly due to such a high pressure?

There have been several posts since I've found the forum (I stumbled across this wealth of knowledge in Oct 2012) and you might want to search 'teeth' & see if you can find some of them & read up on other peoples problems. It was on one of those posts someone suggest I needed a retainer. When I got in to see the orthodontist I found out in my case I was WAY past retainer, but instead had reached a very advanced stage of problems.

I wish I had known problems like this can occur and that I needed a retainer, but I kind of blame the dentist's I went to, they should have known & send me to an orthodontist instead of just saying 'oh well'.

My overall 'word to the wise' - if your teeth are sore, see an orthodontist to see if you need to get a retainer made. It could help you avoid what I'm going thru now.
Jen[/quote]

so interesting to read your post. I posted last week, that I thought that my front teeth were moving. No one validated my statement. Today I was at the dentist. After one year on the hose, my front teeth have moved apart and I am off to see an orthodontist next week. I posted on the board earlier this evening with an update about my dentist visit and then just read your post. Had I seen it earlier, I would have done something earlier. Folks..look in the mirror..is the space between your two front teeth growing?

[49er]

I am not sure I would call it a mistake but I wish to heck I had known that my depression was most likely due to sleep apnea instead of wasting 15 years on psych meds. Yes SNO, I know you can't undo the past but I worry greatly that the years on the meds have destroyed my ability to stay asleep on the machine. Only time will tell.

I also have made the mistake in thinking sleep doctors were willing to help problem solve issues only to realize how wrong I have been. I beginning to think that having a bad one is more the norm than the exception. Perhaps my opinion is jaded due to having had two bad ones but that is the way I feel.

49er

[mollete]

Thinking that xPAP will fix inherently bad sleep (not only does it not, but it usually makes sleep exponentially worse).

[Sir NoddinOff]

Thinking that xPAP will fix inherently bad sleep (not only does it not, but it usually makes sleep exponentially worse).

Care to go into some depth on that theory Dave/Muffy/Mollete or any other of the Bizarro World (also known as Htrae) alternatives: That is a big loaded statement, especially since you made it on CPAPtalk... maybe too edgy for the general populous?

[Drowsy Dancer]

I don't know about the "exponentially worse" part, but I would say that my biggest mistake (other than not acting a year earlier on my self-diagnosis of OSA) was not grasping early enough on that, in formal logical terms, CPAP was necessary but not sufficient to fix my sleep. Even after my airways were propped open appropriately there were other things interfering with my sleep (up to and including a lack of self-discipline about staying up too late at night playing video games).

[STL Mark]

Waited years too long to see a sleep doc.

I second that motion.

I suspected there was a problem for 25 years prior to being emotionally ready to get treatment. I had all kinds of reasons to justify not going for sleep study.

[mollete]

Thinking that xPAP will fix inherently bad sleep (not only does it not, but it usually makes sleep exponentially worse).

Care to go into some depth on that theory...

Theory?

It has been my observation that people with poor sleep efficiencies (<75%) and moderate OSA (AHI ~15-25) often have great difficulty acclimatizing to xPAP because they don't immediately "feel better" (compared to the "night and day" improvement that a huge AHI person would get), and the discomfort of wearing apparatus may further adversely affect sleep efficiency (for instance, by sleeping for 2-4 hours then awakening and being unable to fall back to sleep) thus offsetting any gains seen in a moderate AHI reduction.

This group needs a great deal of encouragement and support (at the least).

[John from Brookston]

Waited years too long to see a sleep doc.

Yep, me too... it took falling asleep at the wheel, waking up in the ditch at 65MPH, over-correcting and spinning the truck twice to ram the message home.

[johnthomasmacdonald]

[
Theory?

It has been my observation that people with poor sleep efficiencies (<75%) and moderate OSA (AHI ~15-25) often have great difficulty acclimatizing to xPAP because they don't immediately "feel better" (compared to the "night and day" improvement that a huge AHI person would get), and the discomfort of wearing apparatus may further adversely affect sleep efficiency (for instance, by sleeping for 2-4 hours then awakening and being unable to fall back to sleep) thus offsetting any gains seen in a moderate AHI reduction.

This group needs a great deal of encouragement and support (at the least).

Well, your theory describes my situation pretty much perfectly. Only missed 3 nights since I started treatment - hurricane Sandy related. My starting AHI was 21 and I don't feel ANY better at all, in fact I'd say I feel quite a bit worse. Certainly my sleep has gone from what seemed to me like heaven, took me about 5 seconds to fall asleep and i slept straight through for 7 - 8 hours. Now it takes me somewhere between 15 minutes and a half hour to fall asleep. I sleep maybe 6 hours and i don't feel as rested upon waking as I used to. Have tried a custom dental appliance, cpap, apap, bilevel, bilevel apap and asv. I have three machines by the bed. The most comfortable is the Resmed S9 bilevel while the Resmed adapt enhanced does the best job of getting my AHI value down. For example, last night i used asv, slept around 6 hours, had an AHI of 0.9 and felt like i hadn't slept at all. It is what it is.

[Drowsy Dancer]

<snip> It has been my observation that people with poor sleep efficiencies (<75%) and moderate OSA (AHI ~15-25) often have great difficulty acclimatizing to xPAP because they don't immediately "feel better" (compared to the "night and day" improvement that a huge AHI person would get)<snip>

Ah! That explains why I, with my 96% sleep efficiency and 71 AHI on my PSG, had a very easy initial adjustment to xPAP. Even a first-week average (per SleepyHead) AHI of 7.96 was a massive improvement.