Sleep study results not bad, why do I feel awful?

About your latency to REM:

As I understand it, REM and Slow wave sleep (SWS) have an inverse relationship. A normal sleeper has more SWS in the early part of the night and more REM in the later part of the night. The two types of sleep basically alternate (interspersed with stage 2) and over the course of the night, the length of SWS periods decrease and the length of REM periods increase. By midway through the night, a normal person has almost no SWS sleep, and has alternating Stage 2 with REM until waking in the morning.

If your latency to REM is increased (and mine always was in all FIVE of my studies) it appears to me that its because your body is being disturbed in moving through the SWS portion of your nights sleep. You can't get your REM until your body has has at least a helping of SWS. That was clearly the way it was in my studies. I think you could postulate that your SWS is very disturbed, perhaps more disturbed than your REM. Did you get the results of your sleep study to find out what percentages of sleep you had?

As for severity: My own experience is that I was VERY sleepy and fatigued with an RDI of 24. Mine was almost totally respiratory effort related arousals, and I didn't have any episodes of low oxygen. My SWS sleep was always much more disturbed than REM and now (since surgery) I have almost no problems with REM sleep. SWS is still very poor and I am still tired. So I conclude that uninterrupted SWS is more critical for your feelings of being rested.

And now my bad news: after several titration studies and lots of CPAP trials at different levels, different masks, etc - I found that no type of CPAP was helpful. I had horrible insomnia, too and was given lots of pseudo-Freudian nonsense about why I had insomnia. I used Cognitive Behavior Therapy and would go back to sleep over and over again no matter how many times I woke with CPAP. But I still never felt rested. The simple truth was that my breathing was not normalized by CPAP and the doctors rather unhelpfully refused to admit that it doesn't work for some people. (I have a lot of other theories about why CPAP didn't work for me, but that is another story...) If I were you, I would use it very carefully according to the prescribed setting, document your use and how you feel. Two other things to do:

1) GEt your hands on the sleep report data. That includes a hypnogram and lots of information about the relationship between disturbances and sleep stages.

2) Getting a data compliant machine may help.

However, the simple fact again is that the doctors tell you what works for most of the people they see. CPAP made me feel worse, and reviewing my sleep studies, I was able to see that there was no evidence that CPAP was doing anything positive for my sleep WHATSOEVER.

This site is great for helping you figure out how to get the best out of your CPAP treatment. I agree with the folks here, that you should pay attention to all the advice about masks, leaks, data etc and give yourself plenty of time to adjust. However, treating your oxygenation, and feeling better are two different things. It's up to you what quality of life you want to have, and sometimes CPAP doesn't cut it. Just my two cents...