JoyD. wrote: ↑Sat Nov 12, 2022 9:59 am
Well, last night I had a terrible night. I had back pain that hurt sleeping on both my R and L sides . . . and I was trying to endure the pain & AVOID going supine!
In my opinion you should NOT have been working so hard to avoid sleeping on your back. Pain is a real sleep killer. And if the
pain was less while lying on your back, you would have been a whole lot better off getting some real sleep on your back rather than tossing and turning all night long enduring pain while trying to avoid back sleeping.
Here's the thing: If your pressure settings are pretty close to where they ought to be, you should be able to sleep on your back and still have the machine prevent most of your obstructive events from happening. In other words, one point of having the pressure set high enough is to allow you to sleep in
all positions so that you
can sleep on your back when you want to.
Therefore, I was extremely restless ALL night, and barely got to the 4-hour mark on my machine so I could use OSCAR. So any data is, no doubt, useless. I tossed & turned all night, turned my machine off several times to get up to get some relief.
Because you tossed and turned all night, yeah, the data in Oscar is "dirty" in the sense of having a lot of SWJ stuff mixed in.
But do note: There's no magic "4-hour mark" for using Oscar: If you use the machine for 5 minutes, Oscar will show the data for those 5 minutes.
In my opinion, the mistake you made was not so much trying to keep your mask on for 4-hours while tossing and turning all night long. In my opinion, the mistake you made was trying to stay off your back all night: Had you allowed yourself to roll onto your back
while using the CPAP, you might have been able to have gotten comfortable enough to actually get some sleep while using the CPAP.
In other words, when you are in pain and trying to sleep, you have to fix the pain in order to sleep. If that means back sleeping, then sleep on your back while using your CPAP. Yeah, a few more events might happen, but getting some sleep on your back with the CPAP beats getting almost no sleep because you take your mask off because you're trying so hard to keep off your back and your in real, significant pain that is being aggravated by trying to sleep on your sides.
When I went to bed, I had the Minimum set to 9, but I was bothered by the air pressure (seemed that I was sensing some aerophagia, because I was uncomfortable & felt the need to burp). I envisioned AutoSet shooting up later to higher pressures & didn't want to face aerophagia & burping with my taped mouth . . . so panic set in & I reduced the Minimum down from 9 to 8 (originally it had been 7), and moved the MAX down just a bit from 18 to 17.4 (not that this would do much).
How long have you been dealing with aerophagia?
I'd like to get that MAX down to have a narrower range so that I won't get those occasional Autoset pressure surges.
Reducing the "occasional Autoset pressure surges" may also require increasing your MIN pressure in order to prevent the things that trigger the pressure surges in the first place. But if your pressure surges are always due to flow limitations, then capping the MAX around your 95% pressure level is a reasonable idea to try.
My WEEKLY report currently says that 95% of the time the pressure is 13.20 or below. Maybe it's too early to do this (because of any erroneous results when I was dealing with LLs several days ago & using the "For Her" Mode), but I'm tempted to set my pressure at 8-14 tonight and see what happens. Is that unreasonable?
Is reducing your pressure range to 8-14 a good or bad idea?
Well that depends. If you're trying to figure out what kinds of pressures your stomach can take because of aerophagia problems and you can handle the idea of your AHI being higher than usual, it makes some sense.
And given that your 95% pressure is usually 13.2, then setting the max pressure at 14 makes some sense: You are allowing your machine to go up to (and exceed by a bit) the pressure that is usually as high as you need it to be to treat your apnea.
But if you make this change in the settings, I would encourage you to keep these settings for at least 4 or 5 days, even if the first night seems like it's a disaster. Sometimes our bodies need a bit of time to really adjust to the new settings.
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