Anyone Retrained Their Sleep Position?

[Loreena]

Yesterday was a prime example. I woke up on my back on top of the handweights. [You and I must have been married in another life, David (you say you wake up on top of your backpack).] When looking at the report, the whole night was pretty good except for the last hour when the wavefom showed an apnea of about 30 secs. I felt like crud the rest of the day even though my AHI was 0.2!! I ordered the Snoogle per Viking Gnome's suggestion to see how that might work out too. I might keep the back pack with inflatable cushions for travel. Nobody knows the trouble we've seen.

The reason I simply must keep on my side is that if I flip onto my back (even for a minute), the pressure does not rise significantly, and it will not have been in time to stop at least one long (timewise) apnea which will leave me feeling bad the next day, even though I had an AHI < 0.5.

Exactly. Its not always your average AHI number. Its isolated sleep events that can ruin your night. I frequently go 4 hours of sleeping with virtually a flat line on ahi. Then the last 3 hours im jumping all over the place, snoring, and the pressure slams up to six to try to fight it off but for naught.

Im aleady in trouble and i'll wake up feeling like crap. The AHI the next morning might show 1.8.

Another reason to sleep on your side. One bad series of apneas, and an AHI of under 1.0 can still make you feel like crap. Not worth it.

And as Pugsy says, you really dont want to be at 18 pressure even if its preventing apneas just so you can sleep on your back. 18 for most of us is considered an extreme pressure which can cause all sorts of other problems.

[SleepyToo2]

The reason I simply must keep on my side is that if I flip onto my back (even for a minute), the pressure does not rise significantly, and it will not have been in time to stop at least one long (timewise) apnea which will leave me feeling bad the next day, even though I had an AHI < 0.5.

Yes, this would be another reason to try to stay on one's side. What might happen is that when in supine sleeping and the pressure not able to react quickly enough (would need more minimum APAP pressure) clusters of events might happen. While the clusters might not go on all night they can be in great enough numbers to cause a person to desat and feel yucky during the clusters but the overall AHI might not be so bad. I had similar thing happen to me when I was first starting out therapy. My AHI was okay but I felt like crap. On the reports I had some clustering of events probably during REM stage sleep (where my OSA is worse and needs more pressure). Machine couldn't respond quickly enough so I set the minimum pressure a little higher and gave it a better head start and it is now able to deal with any REM stage events that might need more pressure. In my case it wasn't a big increase and my minimum pressure wasn't all that high so I had some room to adjust the minimum pressure upwards without causing problems.

Thank you Pugsy! You describe me - I haven't been able to keep the oximeter on all night to be able to correlate it with the apneas, and I have a fixed pressure. However, I do know I feel so-so even though my average AHI over the last year has been 1.17. My sleep doc tells me that I am doing great. I know differently, so when finances improve a bit more I am going to be visiting my PCP and buying an auto machine online with a pressure of 8-12 to start with. Sometimes I have centrals, and sometimes I have OAs or HAs all in the same night. I don't know if it is positional or if something else is going on. I have to go back and look at my sleep study report to see whether I had REM apneas, but I don't think I did. Just not tonight - I am too tired!