Tear Ducts and Humidity

[Padron192664]

I'm having problems with a slight bit of air leaking from my tear ducts. I woke up this morning with a slight irritation in the corner of my right eye, feels like I got a small bit of shampoo in it. Is there any ways to prevent this from happening. My pressure is at 7.

Also, I woke up with a sore throat and congested nostril. Could this be due to acid reflux (for the throat) or do I need to change my humidifier settings (nose and throat)? I like my room colder, 66-69 degrees with a humidity in the lower to mid 50% range. My humidifier setting is 2. I use breathe rite strips, and a saline rinse and when I go to bed both nostrils are clear but when I awake my right nostril is usually quite congested.

Also I cant seem to sleep more than 2 hours with the CPAP (on 6th day now) and still deal with sleep maintenance insomnia issues that seem worse on CPAP as well nocturia.

[nanwilson]

You haven't found your humidity sweet spot yet. Sometimes you need to turn your humidifier down and some folks need to turn it up. You will have to experiment with yours until you get it right. This therapy requires a ton of patience and persistance, trying different things, mask, humidity, pressure, etc until you get it right. Its only been a few days, give it time and give your poor nose a chance to adjust to the air blowing up it.

[BlackSpinner]

I'm having problems with a slight bit of air leaking from my tear ducts.

you need to see an ophthalmologist about this. They can plug it up.

Also I cant seem to sleep more than 2 hours with the CPAP (on 6th day now) and still deal with sleep maintenance insomnia issues that seem worse on CPAP as well nocturia.

Keep the machine on and a lot of the nocturia will probably go away.

[WillCunningham]

Could this be due to acid reflux (for the throat)

I don't have much advice about the tear ducts, I had some dry eye issues myself but that was from small leaks in my mask seal squirting small gusts of air in the direction of my eyes. I did want to talk about your Acid Reflux problem though. One of the best tidbits I picked up from this super informative message board was that Acid Reflux can have a direct impact on your cpap therapy. It seems that even very mild acid reflux can interfere with the effectiveness of cpap. The way it was described to me is that the soft tissues in our airways are held open by the constant pressure. Acid Reflux irritates those soft tissues causing them to be inflamed and less soft which prevents you from getting your full cpap benefits.

I spoke with my doctor about it and he felt bad that he hadn't thought about it and agreed that we needed to treat it. In the end I had good luck with Pepsid AC over the counter medicine and that did the trick for me. I am not up on the latest acid reflux meds, but I definitely recommend treating it so you can eliminate it as a potential problem. Stick with it, it can be hard to stick with it when you aren't seeing results right away but when you when you finally get things working it will make things so much better for you! Good Luck!

[robysue]

Seconding BlackSpinner's comments about seeing an ophthalmologist about the CPAP air leaking into your tear ducts. While this is not a truly rare side effect of CPAP, it is nowhere near as common as aerophagia. It also has the potential to cause some real damage to your eyes if nothing is done about it. You should also report the air leaking through tear ducts to your sleep doctor's office.

When I was just starting out on CPAP at a fixed pressure of 9cm, I had real problems with air getting into my eyes via my tear ducts. The sleep doc's PA wound up first ordering a week's worth of APAP and then a switch to APAP with pressure range of4--8cm. That little bit of pressure reduction seemed to be all I needed since the problem of "air in eyes via tear ducts" went from a nightly occurrence to a somewhat uncommon phenomenon.

Re the insomnia: I bid you a sad welcome to the CPAP&Insomnia club and hope your membership in the club is a short one. Have you suffered from insomnia before CPAP? If so, you should first try any tricks at all that have previously worked for you. If not, give the CPAP a bit more time since 6 days is not much time and there's a lot to get used to.

But if you want a lot more info about what I've learned both through my own long experiences as well as listening at length to others about their CPAP-induced/enhanced insomnia, you might want to click on my Taming the CPAP Induced Insomnia Monster link in my signature.