1st Night

LOL. I do not have facial hair yet....I am a 49 year old woman....so it could be any day now...lol. Thanks for making me laugh. I am wondering if I just need to get a new mask. I did take a shower but that was right after work several hours before I slept. I am going to put all the days I have data for in order. The older one was Aug 1st. These are Aug 2nd, 3rd, and last night the 4th.

You know what is funny is the day I had the lowest AHI reading was the day I felt the least refreshed upon waking up.

Sorry. I have no way to know gender and when I see leaks come and go I can't help but wonder if facial hair is a factor because it often is for the male species.
Just looking for potential causes for the mask farts.

Now that I see where the pressure went to...the higher pressures were likely the culprit. The fitting you did at 10 cm works well for a while but blows out at the higher pressure you went to.
I do wonder why it went so high....maybe you were on your back more or maybe it was related to REM stage sleep both of which can cause OSA to worsen and/or need more pressure. I face a similar issue but mine I know is REM related. My OSA is documented worse in REM.

Everything you see on the Events graph below the Clear Airway event line is related to obstructive airway issues.
Your minimum pressure isn't sufficient to hold the airway open well enough to prevent the collapse from trying to happen.

It doesn't surprise me that you didn't feel the good numbers you had one night. AHI alone doesn't guarantee much other than a good math score. Getting good numbers is the easy part....feeling them and sleeping good isn't so easy.
We don't sleep the same each night for one thing.

Were you ever asleep for that last session starting around 06:00??

No....had the news on and was just kind of waking up. So would you suggest I raise my minimum from 10 to higher?

One more question then since you weren't asleep when all that stuff was flagged after 6 AM....how about before the leaks woke you up....very many wake ups or did you sleep soundly for the most part until the pressure started to climb and leaks were problematic?

If you slept soundly for the most part....try 11 cm minimum tonight. Might end up needing a little more but I like to be conservative at this stage of things and besides...sometimes just a little change can make a substantial difference and small changes are often easier to adjust to. Too big of a change at one time can mean problems sleeping and without sleep...none of this matters.

If you didn't sleep soundly that first session....leave it at 10 cm for another night.

These machine can and will flag awake breathing irregularities and respond...but awake stuff doesn't count.
The machine doesn't know about sleep status at all. It measures air flow and that's it. Awake/semi awake breathing irregularities can cause false positive flagging and responding.

Yes, as far as I know I believe I was sleeping soundly beforehand. I used the same settings as the night before but tonight I will adjust the min to 11 and should I still keep the max at 20? I will upload the data for last night when I get home from work tonight.

Thank you Pugsy. I hope you have a nice day.

You know since it was the going really high that caused the leaks most likely...maybe with a more optimum minimum it won't need to go so high. That's my hope anyway....plus we don't know the impact sleeping position might have played and it was one night and we don't know if the conditions, whatever they were, will repeat themselves.

The stuff after 6 AM....that's making your AHI look worse than it really was. Remove that session and while the night wasn't real pretty, it wasn't horribly horrible either.

If it works out that leaks again become a problem I would be considering limiting the max a bit just to keep you asleep so that we could best evaluate the pressure needs. I don't know how much of that increase was the leak waking you up and false positive stuff in turn happening to drive the pressure even more.

I don't expect perfect 0.0 AHI numbers.
1...won't get them when we have a lot of awake time anyway...too much chance of false positives from awake breathing
2...it's an unrealistic expectation anyway and 0.0 doesn't guarantee good sleep....I am a prime example of that.
3...I do want to keep the real flagged events as low as possible and sometimes that means I have to decide if what I see is real or asleep flagged events. I have to do this for myself fairly often. A while back I had a night where the AHI was 3.4 I think it was. Unusually high for me and I took the time to look at each flagged event to see if I was asleep or not. Not a single flagged event was a real asleep event. Every single flagged event (all categories) was related to awake or arousal breathing false positive flagging and despite the events not being real asleep events my machine responded like they were real. That night I had a really bad (much worse than my usual bad) night in terms of back pain. I remember waking many, many times and tossing and turning trying to get comfortable.

At some point you may need to learn about asleep flagged stuff and awake flagged stuff.
http://freecpapadvice.com/sleepyhead-free-software

If you do end up having times where you just need some really high pressures...maybe on your back and in REM combo or something....all masks present extra challenges at pressures in the upper teens. Especially the masks that have more skin to mask contact area.
Any leak that disturbs sleep is unwanted...even if it doesn't go into large leak territory.
Anything that disturbs our sleep is unwanted.
We might sacrifice and let a couple of events slide to get leaks better managed so that you don't wake up...by limiting the max a little but first lets see just how often it wants to go so high. That one excursion to 19 that we saw...might have been a fluke.

Did you know you could remove that second sleep session starting at 6 AM from the overall calculations?
Look over on the left side and scroll way down below the statistics until you see your sleep sessions.
Click on the session starting at around 6 and turn it from green to red. That will remove that session from the data being reported and recalculate your AHI. All that does is turn the reporting off for that session...it can be easily turned back on by clicking on it again to change it back to green.

Two more nights worth of data.

How did you sleep last night?
How do you feel today?
Any problems with the slightly higher minimum?

Your choice...couple more nights at the 11 minimum or do another 1 cm increase in the minimum to 12 cm tonight. You need more minimum to deal with the FLs and snores which are indicators that the airway is still trying to collapse but they aren't progressing to the point of collapse to earn a hyponea or OA flag.

Very informative. Thank you again for sharing your knowledge with me. I didn't sleep very well so i would like to keep it as is for another day and see if it was just a fluke. I would say it was my worst night's sleep since being on the machine....but again I would rather go another day or two at this min and max to see how I feel after each night. Do you think that is a good idea?

As far as how I felt today, I am more tired today after work then I have been but wonder if that is because we are closing in on the end of the work week.

I didn't notice any problems with the higher starting minimum.

By all means...take more nights at the new minimum and see if things settle down a bit.
There is no rush. I actually prefer 1 week at new settings and that's what I did way back when I was in this tweaking stage.
I did 0.5 cm increases and 1 week at each setting. There's a lot of truth to the give it time thing especially when we know we didn't sleep so great.

Some people like to move fast...some people like to move slow....you get to decide how fast your want to move.

Sounds good. I will do at least a few nights maybe as much as a week at the same rate to get enough data, as well as, personal reflection of how I feel at that rate before making the next move. Will still continue to post data along with personal feedback each day or two. Thank you again for your help. Have a great night!