New here Need some advice

Hello folks, new here and just wanted to say a few things. Sleep apnea sucks. I knew I've always had it, I'm 31 years old. Everyone always complaint of my snoring when I was younger and even my partner hated it. While it never bothered me, I started to get tired, fatigue, moody at the age of 27. This is also when I quit smoking and took up vaping. There was pros and cons about quitting, I noticed that symptoms started to show up out of nowhere just to list a few, pains here and there, abdominal pains, fatty liver, weird pains in my head, fatigue, kidney stones, balance issues, feeling of passing out, feeling of falling, anxiety, low of energy, loose stools, pre hypertension. I'm 5'4, a little overweight. When doctors look at me they see normal, because I'm not fat, obese or don't look overweight. Even though my stomach is always bloated,but anyways. I've been to every specialist, ive had ct scans, mri's, blood work, ultrasound, dye contrast to my arteries man you name it. And guess what? ALL NORMAL!
Besides beating fatty liver, worked out, eat a good diet. All the other symptoms stayed, until one day I decided to get a sleep study. And what do you know I was diagnosed with severe OSA. I had 4 sleep studies done so far because the previous two I wasn't convince, I switch to a new doctor and ordered a new sleep study and still nothing is improving. Well I did notice a few things like I don't get as cranky and headaches don't appear often. But I still feel unbalance, I still have a hard time concentrating.
I'm very sensitive to caffeine now and nicotine just makes me feel weird. I cut down on these and I see no improvement without these sedatives.

I'm using a very nice cpap machine that can record data and send it over the air to the lab that records my AHI, therapy hours etc. etc.
Its a philip brand. My prescribe pressure is at 7cm h20 with humidifer set to 3 and c-flex set to 3. I notice i feel better at 8cm, not sure why the lab shows I breathe better and oxygen sats stays better at 7cm,but i feel horrible at 7cm when waking up. So i decided to stay at 8cm. Even my partner says I don't snore with the cpap. But its just not working 100% for me.

Even so I'm not feeling better like a million bucks just like how other people feel when getting on the cpap. What could it be?

Welcome and I am glad you got checked out and are making the steps to better health! Have you read any information on here about the SleepyHead software? If not I would suggest downloading that and there are lots of wonderful people here than can help you be able to read that and help improve your therapy. The doctors can be great, but when you take over your therapy the majority of the time you get better results. Someone will be by I know with a lot more knowledge than me. Good luck! Just be sure to read as much as you can on here. There is loads of good information.

Moogle wrote: Even so I'm not feeling better like a million bucks just like how other people feel when getting on the cpap. What could it be?

How long have you been PAPing?

Most people do not start feeling better immediately and most people never wake up one morning suddenly feeling like a million bucks.

Rather the improvement in how we feel is usually gradual and it takes time before we start to feel normal or close to normal.

Most people do start to notice some small improvements in how they feel with in the first several weeks of PAPing. The small improvements continue until you finally feel reasonably well rested and restored when you wake up and you have enough energy to get through the day without needing lots of naps.

For some people, it takes much longer. In my case, I had a spectacular Crash and Burn right after starting CPAP where I felt a hundred to a thousand times worse on PAP than I had before starting PAP. A large part of that was that I had a very difficult adjustment period and my sleep went to hell in a handbasket because of some very severe insomnia. But about 6 months after starting PAP, when I was keeping a sleep log for fighting the insomnia, I began to notice that several days each week I was waking up pain-free for the first time in years. As I continued to PAP and as the insomina was reined in, those "wake up with no pain" days grew from 2 or 3 days a week to 5 or 6 days a week. By the time I had been PAPing about 9 or 10 months, I started noting when I woke in pain rather than when I woke up without pain because the days that I woke up in pain had become relatively rare. That's when I knew for sure that PAP was helping me feel better than I had before starting CPAP.