Spouse of CPAP user can't sleep

My wife considers the noise from the machine to be white noise. Much better than snoring.

Thanks for all the responses! You've given me a lot of good information here, and a lot of good suggestions.

The machine itself is amazingly quiet -- an EPR Escape II -- so I don't feel that it's the sound of the machine itself.
I'm a fairly heavy sleeper and have rarely had trouble sleeping -- even with his snoring.
Someone mentioned his wife's getting used to the change in his breathing patterns, and I think that's my main problem.
After 20 years of sharing a bed, I've grown accustomed to my husband's breathing/snoring patterns.
I've suspected he had sleep apnea for years. (His father died of a heart attack at age 56.)
When I don't hear his usual breathing, I wake up because my "selective hearing"
picks up on the change. For years, I've been monitoring his breathing in my sleep.
I think I will eventually adapt to the new breathing patterns and be able to sleep again.
So, for now, my temporary solution is this:
I drink a glass of wine and take 2 benadryls before bed,
then I wrap my down pillow around my ears to muffle the sound. It's working!
In response to the "fan in the bedroom" solution, last night it was raining hard and we had
the ceiling fan running, so that may have helped also.
I expect it will take a week or two more before I adapt. I did talk to him about my sleeping problem,
and we've been able to laugh about it, so it's not creating any tension in our relationship, thankfully.
We may cure his sleep apnea but create my new dependency on alcohol and drugs in the process! (Not really.)
Meanwhile, my husband is still getting used to the cpap also.
Now our fear is that we'll both finally get used to the cpap, and then when we go tent camping in July,
he'll have trouble sleeping without it, and I won't be able to sleep through his snoring anymore!
I've heard people use battery packs when they camp.
My husband is considering getting the dental appliance to use when camping. Has anyone had any luck with that?

Thanks again for all your responses. It helps to know others have found and are finding ways to adapt.
I know many people swear by the effectiveness of the cpap. It's not the most elegant solution for sleep apnea,
but it's the best we've got at his point in time. It still makes me laugh to think that doctors have managed
to get people to wear that silly-looking thing every night. It must work!

ww wrote:A $10 box fan from WalMart solves the problem. Just put it near the bed or blowing in a closet and CPAP noises are completely gone!!!!!

Stick a piece of gum to one blade and the rattling alone will drown out a hurricane...

Benedryl can interfere with normal sleep stages, so it is not the best sleep aid, even though may over-the-counter sleep aids contain the same active ingredient as in Benedryl (diphenhydramine.)

You might be better off asking your GP about a script for Ambien. It does not affect sleep stages.

As for the camping -- your husband will probably find that he feels pretty lousy off CPAP, making for a lovely vacation. So you should probably investigate battery power. If you have a vehicle nearby, there are setups to connect many CPAPs to its electrical system.

I just found this thread since I'm currently having the same problem. It's a relief to know it's not just me! My guy has had his cpap for about two weeks now. He's sleeping great and I'm very glad to see his normal perky personality reemerging from the tired, cranky guy he'd become.

The problem is that now I'm not sleeping. I'm tired and cranky and feeling weepy from the lack of sleep. I don't have a problem falling asleep, but I'm sleeping very shallowly and waking up repeatedly. Normally, I lay down, go to sleep and wake up in the morning. You can poke me, roll me over, have conversations with me (that make sense even), snore in my ear loud enough to wake the dead, run trains and sirens by my house and just about anything else you can think of. I sleep through it all. I have little experience with this constant sleep deprivation, but I'm sure you can all relate.

It's NOT the machine noise or even mask leaks or anything that's bothering me. I fall asleep with the machine just fine, I can't even hear it when I do wake up and I've slept through the couple of times he's rolled over and had mask leaks and started snoring and all that. I have no idea what IS waking me up and it's driving me nuts.

I went with the assumption that it's the LACK of noise that was bothering me. I tried playing music as I went to sleep. I tried playing music ALL night long. It hasn't made any difference. I'm going to keep trying for a while longer in the hopes that it's just my subconscious worrying about him not breathing since I can't hear him anymore. If things don't improve in a week or two though, I'm not sure what I'm going to do.