ASV - Patient Initiated Breaths Fall to Zero

I just wanted to follow up on this thread and possibly get some opinions. I saw the pulmonary doctor today and he said that based on the Encore overview graphs, I should be cured. That said, he realizes I feel like crap and was very concerned by the daily reports I brought in from Sleepy Head (patient initiated breathing = 0, inverse respiration, more events in the morning, etc). He wants me to get a second opinion from a major research hospital.

I called the sleep clinic at the hospital and they can't see me until Dec. While the place he recommended is probably the best in the country, I don't think I can wait five months. I'm planning to see if my neuro can provide a referral to someone that may have dealt with my condition before.

Its also been suggested that I buy a pulse oximeter in order to make sure my O2 saturation doesn't fall too low while I'm sleeping (or if it does, so that I may be able to get in sooner as an emergency). I figure the folks here would probably know which oximeters are best for sleeping.

Thanks,

BP

BackwardPawn wrote: I figure the folks here would probably know which oximeters are best for sleeping.

cms50F or cms50I under 100$, from aliexpress.com, shop the listings.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of aliexpress.com before. The prices look better than Amazon; I was hoping to find something that could be shipped in a few days, but I guess a couple weeks won't hurt when I'm already waiting until December.

BackwardPawn:

I purchased my CMS oximeters from Cooper Medical and I'm sure they can ship quickly. The price will be a little higher but not that much. I live in South Carolina so that UPS ground gets delivered from them to me the next business day if you order in the morning.

What part of the county are you located? I can recommend the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota as an excellent sleep center. There system allows for in-house referrals to that if they discover something that requires a different specialty, you'll be seeing that doc either that day or the next. If that isn't too far away, your doctor can get you in pretty quickly given your symptoms. Their costs are very competitive with local facilities. Comparing their costs to my local hospital, theirs were lower. A key question will be coverage from your insurance company. Some of the ACA policies exclude facilities out of network so check carefully.

If you decide to go, send me a PM and I'll get you the name of the hotel we use when we go up there. It is relatively inexpensive, connected to the Clinic via the Mayo tunnel system in Rochester so you can just walk to appointments etc., and caters to patients of the clinic. We've been there five times and can credit them for saving my life and that of my wife so I'm just a little biased. It was there that I got my diagnosis of severe complex sleep apnea and got me on this journey.