First night on CPAP did not go so well :Update- a breakthru!

[Pugsy]

Attempted to release the baby crow. He can't fly well enough at all just yet. Probably just as well, he is just now learning about pecking for food. I had him outside but he just couldn't fly very far (like 3 ft maybe) and no real control.
Used the time to clean out his "cage" which is a cat carrier and give him a new clean nest to perch on. So he is back in the house. I don't really want a pet crow full time so I will make every effort to set him free. He just isn't ready right now.
It is kinda cool to have him fall asleep sitting on my hand though after feeding. He likes to perch on my fingers.

With full face masks the air is more diffused than with the nasal pillows and your minimum pressure very likely won't seem like it is quite enough air moving for comfort. So not surprised that it wasn't quite comfortable enough for you.

[lazer]

You know what. You might have acquired a new pet. It sounds like by handfeeding the baby crow that it has become tamed and a bit domesticated and may not ever fair well if/when released to the wild. Might have to put up an ad to see if anyone is looking for a tame crow as a pet.

Had a good AHI with the Mirage Quatro last night of .9 even though I woke up twice, once with an urge to itch and thus had to remove the mask for a minute to scratch again and another awaking with a very sore spot developing on the bridge of my nose - see my other thread... Otherwise, I'm kinda liking the ability to be able to switch back n forth from the pillows to this type of mask when I have the congestion.

[Pugsy]

Having a pet crow is just asking for trouble...I have 3 dogs and 2 cats. So far the cats have been real nice but I know they are just waiting for me to fatten the little guy up for them. He would have to be caged and that isn't fair to a wild creature.
Hopefully when he can fly better he will get the idea. I know he would have been out of the nest for sure by now. Makes me wonder if something is damaged causing the lack of ability to fly well.

Well, I started the rescue and if I end up with a pet crow in a cage then I guess it doesn't really matter much. Just one more mouth to feed. Sure would be nice to not to have to hand feed him though. Right now he is in a hard sided cat carrier.
If I have to I will get a cage (saw a couple at local flea market the other day).

I raised a baby robin once...I was able to let him fly away. I used to go out and dig up earthworms for him.
The things I do for my critters.

I can't stand anything on the bridge of my nose because it causes immediate congestion. Even my glasses on my nose will do it somewhat. Long ago decided that the nasal pillow mask would be what I would use and not mess with the others.
Tried one of the over the nose masks at the titration study. Within 5 minutes nose was completely closed off.
No sense in my even going down that road.

[lazer]

So last night I switched back to the Swift FX. I do barely recall dreaming more than normal but can't really recall the dreams. My AHI recorded by the APAP/SleepyHead is the highest to date. Seems like for me, I had a lot more obstructives going on for some reason. I slept pretty much solid through the night and only remember awaking partially several times say after 4am on. I'm a little puzzled as to why so many OSA's... = Again, this is based on my personal history as normally not observing those in the reports so much. Many of them seem clustered together to. Just wondering, with the increased dreaming activity indicating more REM possibly, would this be a possible indicator that I do in fact have OSA but that it is pretty much only showing up in REM sleep and thus why my previous sleep studies never really showed the condition if I wasn't reaching REM then?

[Pugsy]

Could be REM or sleep position. Sure looks like REM stages it could be REM. I am documented per sleep study worse in REM and I have seen similar clusters often.
See this hypnogram of normal stages and compare timelines. Once you get to a point that you can comfortably raise the minimum to around 8 or so (where you seem to average) then the machine will be able to get to those stubborn events a little quicker and the snores will clean up as well as the little clusters. I have them happen even yet now but they are very rare. When I first started and my pressure was not quite high enough I saw them often.

[lazer]

Could be REM or sleep position. Sure looks like REM stages it could be REM. I am documented per sleep study worse in REM and I have seen similar clusters often.
See this hypnogram of normal stages and compare timelines. Once you get to a point that you can comfortably raise the minimum to around 8 or so (where you seem to average) then the machine will be able to get to those stubborn events a little quicker and the snores will clean up as well as the little clusters. I have them happen even yet now but they are very rare. When I first started and my pressure was not quite high enough I saw them often.

How do I get one of those? Hypnograms?

[Pugsy]

You want that hypnogram?
There are others but I liked that one because it was nice and large.
You can right click on the image...choose copy image and then paste to your desktop. See if that works.
If it doesn't you can just do a screen shot of the image and save it to your desktop.
There a hypnogram here but it is smaller and harder to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep
Let me see if I can steal it. Yep I can steal it. Make your own copy of it if you wish and later I will remove the IMG link so that I am not hogging bandwidth.

[lazer]

You want that hypnogram?
There are others but I liked that one because it was nice and large.
You can right click on the image...choose copy image and then paste to your desktop. See if that works.
If it doesn't you can just do a screen shot of the image and save it to your desktop.
There a hypnogram here but it is smaller and harder to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep
Let me see if I can steal it. Yep I can steal it. Make your own copy of it if you wish and later I will remove the IMG link so that I am not hogging bandwidth.

Lol! I seem to be confused. I meant how do I get one of those from "SleepyHead" or whatever? I thought you were showing me one of yours with that image you posted and wondered how I could track/determine what stage sleep I am in from the machine OR whatever you would have used to produce that graph. Sorry if I'm missing something obvious as I do tend to over think things and get totally off track and confused.

[Pugsy]

Oh, so sorry.

We have no way to get sleep stages from SleepyHead or any other software. The machine doesn't offer that data.
What we have to do is compare the approximate timeline for our "clusters" to the time line for REM stage sleep that is for "normal" people.
Example...First REM normally comes around 90 to 120 minutes after sleep onset and as the night goes along we have more REM stages and they are more frequent and last longer. So it would be entirely common to see a little cluster about 2 hours into sleep onset and more of them in the wee hours of the morning.

Since I am documented per sleep study much worse in REM (AHI 53 in REM vs 12 in Non REM) and I have 3 years of looking at reports I can pretty much eyeball clusters and see if they likely correspond to REM stage timeline.

My prescribed pressure was 8 cm so when I first started therapy using APAP I did 8 min and 10 max...It quickly became apparent that the 8 wasting doing the job. Let me see if I can find an old report. Some of the links are dead and I don't remember how to get to that photobucket account.

[Pugsy]

I found this old thread. It has a couple of good examples of the clusters, lower pressure and a good report after I increase the pressure a bit.
I think you can see why I sound like a broken record on your minimum pressure right now.
First image link is gone but a couple of the others are still there and show you what I mean.
Do I know for sure that these are REM clusters? Of course not. There is no way to know but with experience and my history...when I showed all this to my doctor... she agreed and I got the official blessing to use APAP with 20 max for the sometimes 18 cm pressure needed stubborn events. Does it really matter if they are REM or not...not really but it does offer an explanation..Whatever the cause...they need to be dealt with. Just interesting that they come in groups which could be REM. Also in my sleep study I didn't seem to have any sleep position issues. Supine sleeping wasn't particularly worse than side sleeping.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42302&p=372283#p372283

[lazer]

I found this old thread. It has a couple of good examples of the clusters, lower pressure and a good report after I increase the pressure a bit.
I think you can see why I sound like a broken record on your minimum pressure right now.
First image link is gone but a couple of the others are still there and show you what I mean.
Do I know for sure that these are REM clusters? Of course not. There is no way to know but with experience and my history...when I showed all this to my doctor... she agreed and I got the official blessing to use APAP with 20 max for the sometimes 18 cm pressure needed stubborn events. Does it really matter if they are REM or not...not really but it does offer an explanation..Whatever the cause...they need to be dealt with. Just interesting that they come in groups which could be REM. Also in my sleep study I didn't seem to have any sleep position issues. Supine sleeping wasn't particularly worse than side sleeping.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42302&p=372283#p372283

Thanks Pugsy. Makes a bit of sense now.

[lazer]

Why is the majority of my night even when the pressure doesn't jump much a constant bounce? I see other people's reports on here and the low pressure line seems to be much straighter and only increases on actual events.

Example from last night:

[MaxDarkside]

How do I get one of those? Hypnograms?

Late reply...

Zeo. Here's mine, the top typical when I started out, the bottom is a nice purdy hippo-gram from a few days ago.



le'orange is wake
grey is light sleep
green is REM
dark green is Deeep sleeeeep

[Pugsy]

Your machine does little test probes...this is normal...all those little pointy saw tooth looking things...those are the machine doing its job...All Respironics APAPs do that. It really isn't a spike...it is a very gradual step up and down but due to scale...looks a bit dramatic like a spike. It actually is a stair step up and back down. Those are all the machine doing its job. I have had reports where it never varied more than those probes.
I have an example of one in my experiment gone bad thread. Look at the second image Aug 21 I think it is.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=67883&p=631376&hili ... mb#p631376

Your only real pressure changes occurred at 3:30 to 4:00 or so..those were small changes and the major change
was roughly 5 AM to around 6:30.

[lazer]

Thanks for explaining that Pugsy. I thought I was going nuts or something...

To MaxDarkside: I have a bedside Zeo on it's way per my other thread so hope to get some graphs like that soon and a better understanding of my sleep stages or lack thereof so I can attempt to make improvements.