Well.....it all depends on your definition of "alleviate my sleep apnea".
And more importantly...sleep quality itself.
You tend to want near perfection in both categories...really, really low AHI and lots and lots of sleep....and at the same time not give you rain out or dry mouth. Is that just about it?
You were worried about random clusters occurring most likely after first REM cycle. So we started increasing the pressure and to be honest we didn't know if that cluster was a real asleep cluster or an arousal/awake cluster.
Look on your OSCAR statistics down at the bottom for what settings you have tried and when.
I just cleaned out my sent box 3 days ago....so I no longer have the PM I sent you. Sorry. I don't remember the specifics.
I am thinking it was 10 epap minimum and PS of 4 and max IPAP 25.
One thing I need to mention is that you really aren't/weren't giving the settings much time before making another change.
That patience pill is huge and hard to swallow.
Some years ago when I first started out using bilevel I had no idea what to start with so I picked a setting and got "okay" results...AHI between 2.5 and 4.5 for the most part but not consistently as some nights were a lot higher.
So I figured that was as good as any place to start. Made an agreement with myself to not change anything for 6 weeks.
That was really hard to do because some nights the results weren't so great and I seemed to have a lot of them at first.
At the 6 week mark I did an evaluation...I never changed anything during that time and I was pleasantly surprised to see the AHI had reduced to where it was consistently between 1.0 and 1.5 and often less than 1.0.
I was sleeping about 45 minutes longer as well.
There is some truth to that "give it time" thing. But I will be the first to admit....it's hard to do.
I really wish you could get to where you can evaluate asleep vs awake/arousal flagged events so we would know if we need more pressure or just need more/better sleep. To keep increasing the pressure trying to kill events that aren't real asleep events is never going to work out well. By your own admission you know your sleep quality needs improvement and you want to fix it with tweaks to the machine but we can't fix bad sleep with the machine unless the bad sleep is from the airway issue.
I have a couple of examples from last night to share with you....I had major trouble falling asleep last night and then I woke up and wanted to go back to sleep but couldn't.
Both these examples are awake/arousal related. I know for a solid fact I was awake during both of the segments.
When I went through and evaluated each flagged event....only one out of the entire night was a real asleep event.