Snoopchic wrote: I took a ton of things people said on here and researched and tried to practice it.
Practice requires time and
repeated effort. You have
tried CPAP once. That is not practice.
You also may be implying that you have tried to practice the many things that folks have suggested to bring the anxiety under control. Pardon my skepticism, but I seriously doubt that you have actually
worked at making CBT for anxiety work. Because CBT requires real effort and real work and, above all, real
patience.
Let's step back from the untreated OSA for a bit. I strongly suspect that the anxiety/phobia issues are seriously and negatively affecting your life. There is no magic answer to fixing those problems, but they can be addressed if you are willing to work
hard for weeks and
months. If you would get the kind of professional help you need to address the anxiety, then treating the OSA (at a later date) would not seem as "scary".
The device was sooooooo much worse than I even imagined, it was seriously like drowning, but, I am not here for a miricle, I just wanted support and options.
This is a
CPAP support group. So we skew heavily towards CPAP and not all the other things that are sometimes done to "treat" OSA. As was suggested by someone else, apneaboard may be a better match for forum.
There are some other treatments for OSA, but here's the thing: None of them comes anywhere near as close to the effectiveness of CPAP and many of them are indeed border-line scams or outright scams.
It's possible to find a doc who's willing to do surgery to treat OSA. But be aware, the typical definition of "success" is to reduce the AHI by 50%. If your untreated OSA is severe, that means after "successful" surgery you may well still have OSA that is in the moderate range of 15-29 events per hour. And even with this rather loose definition of "success", only 50% of surgery patients have "successful" surgeries. And the surgery is highly invasive and painful. And even with the best of surgical outcomes, the OSA is likely to return in 5-10 years AND once the surgery is done, it can actually be harder to make CPAP work.
It's possible to find a doc/dentist to make a custom oral appliance to treat the OSA. For folks with no TMJ problems and with mild or mild-to-moderate OSA, this may actually treat the OSA effectively. But here again, "effective oral appliance therapy usually means a 50% reduction in AHI, and the appliance is far bulkier than the usual TMJ guard. And you say that your small TMJ guard makes you gag and choke. An OSA oral appliance attaches to both the top and bottom teeth and literally pulls the bottom jaw out of alignment (in an effort to make the airway larger). It can be painful. And it can aggravate TMJ issues quite a bit. And long term it can lead to dental problems.
Beyond CPA and those two alternatives to CPAP? Anything else that is sold to "fix OSA" is indeed a scam. And there are a lot of scams out there.
I read report after report that said how many people have anxiety, but I haven't found anything that helps.
We're working in the dark here: You have spent more time attacking suggestions I and others have made rather than giving us a thoughtful response along the lines of "I've tried <whatever>, but didn't find it effective in reducting my anxiety because <specific reasons>"
Again, though, it's a moot point because of the cost. Upfront and on going.
Your life. You and your husband have to decide whether your health is worth some $$$. If you don't spend the money now, you (or your daughter) will spend a lot more money later when your health deteriorates substantially in 10-20 years.
