New to this - Questions On Centrals?

[palerider]

I did get good news from my 6 week follow up with the BIPAP. The doctor was pleased with how I've done and said she would see me in a year, sooner if needed.

We've got higher standards for 'very good' than most doctors... do see about letting us know what version of sleepyhead and what exact machine you've got, so we can take a look at your data

[alww]

I still don’t have the sleephead app. My daughter who was doing it for me is unavailable due to her husband having unexpected surgery. Hopefully I’ll get that soon.
Anyway, I am totally confused by what’s going on tonight with my numbers. Since I have my granddogs I thought I’d just sleep in the recliner with my BIPAP. I wanted to see if sleeping more elevated would help my numbers and also help keep the mask from leaving such bad indentions in my face. This experiment has totally not turned out as expected! Both granddogs ended up in the chair with me. So basically my position is sitting upright, I guess with my head pushed slightly forward. Well, after 2.25 hrs and the same mask marks on my face, the same as I get on my side, and bad AHI, I’m giving up on the mask for the night! I don’t even want to go to sleep. Here is the DreamMapper data.
1:15 hrs- AHI 40.3 - CA 10 - OSA 40 - HYPO 1
2:25 hrs - AHI 39.3 - CA 14 - OSA 80 - HYPO 1

What is going on here?? And I haven’t even been asleep the whole time, with moving around and dogs on me. If I take a short power nap during the day I usually just sit in the recliner like to night, or semi lean back. If I have 80 OSA in 2:25 hours with mask in this position, what’s happening when I don’t have the mask on?

[Pugsy]

The machine doesn't do anything but measure air flow and respond/record accordingly...it has no idea if you are asleep or not.
Our breathing when awake (the air flow that the machine measures) is very irregular when compared to asleep breathing.
If you didn't sleep because of the granddogs hopping in the chair with you or whatever....lots of irregular breathing going on for the machine to record as some sort of apnea event.
Doesn't have to be a central apnea that gets flagged by mistake. It can be any of those flagged events that aren't real in the sense that we weren't asleep.

I don't understand how the machine can be fooled about OAs.....I can understand about being fooled with centrals but OAs and hyponeas I don't understand it but I know it happens. I have seen it happen to me. I have seen OAs and hyponeas flagged when I know with 100% certainty I was awake. Never as many as you are maybe seeing but then I don't try to sleep in a recliner wearing my mask and have the granddogs jumping up in my lap trying to find a spot either.

And I haven’t even been asleep the whole time, with moving around and dogs on me. If I take a short power nap during the day I usually just sit in the recliner like to night, or semi lean back. If I have 80 OSA in 2:25 hours with mask in this position, what’s happening when I don’t have the mask on?

Well the first thought might be "gosh if I have 80 OAs in 2 hours with the machine...how many do I have without the machine...it must be god awful high numbers"....and it might be but there's also a good chance that 70 of those 80 flagged events aren't real and are awake flagged events messing with the numbers. Stuff that gets flagged when we are awake or semi awake simply isn't a factor in things.
We HAVE to be asleep for them to be real in the sense that they matter and are potentially hurting us.
Pauses in breathing or irregular breathing while awake....won't hurt us. We do it all the time and don't even realize it. It's a normal fact of life. The machine simply doesn't have any way to know if those irregularities are from awake breathing or asleep breathing.
It just calls them like it sees them and we have to decide if they are really important or not.

So those hours you tried to sleep in the recliner with mask and machine on....and the fact that you know you didn't sleep solidly because of the granddogs disturbing your sleep....makes that high AHI meaningless. You must be asleep for it to matter in terms of what it can do to the body. Awake flagged anything simply has to be mentally removed from the evaluation process. It's hard to do when you can't see the flow rate (you need the software) to confirm that you were asleep or awake but you still have to pretty much shrug your shoulders and move on. Nothing you can do about it anyway and until we see stuff flagged when we know for sure you were asleep there is no reason to do anything about it except try to get better sleep quality.

Do you know how to compress/zip and entire SD card? Not just the individual files/folders one by one but the entire SD card in one step?
If you can do that and email it to me then I can run it through my Sleepyhead program and do a quick evaluation of what is going on with you. As long as the file isn't too big to email you can attach it to an email just like you would a photo...then I can download and unzip it and run it through SH.
Or I can fix up a place you can upload it to in my Dropbox folder and I can get it from there.
But you have to know how to compress/zip the SD card in one step...so that I can get a mirror copy of the SD card....for me to run it through SleepyHead. I can't do it with bits and pieces and try to recreated the SD card with putting bits and pieces together.

[alww]

Thanks Pugsy! I was thinking the OAs were probably of no concern since I know I was awake during most of that timeframe. I don’t have a clue about the zip file. My daughter is my computer person with things like that. I will check with her and get back with you on this.
I really appreciate your input and help!