Can I have my own thread?

[M.D.Hosehead]

Many of your friends will be happy to read this.
Thanks for posting!

[SleepingUgly]

Today my eyes were drier than usual. I really hope not to have to go down THAT road again... I already have plugs in my tear ducts and use Restasis eye drops, and in general when I wake up in the middle of the night I put eye drops in due to dry eyes. Drier than THAT I do NOT want to deal with. I didn't think that the pillows were leaking into my eyes but it seems like there's just air blowing around my eyes, I assume thanks to the exhaust vent. Hopefully it's not blowing through the back of my nose up into my eyes (I know some people believe that can occur, although I've never found a scrap of information about that and none of the eye doctors I've asked have heard of such a thing).

This is my data from last night using the Swift LT for Her at 6cm. At some point toward the end of my wearing time, I felt like my mouth was opening. Maybe that's what can be seen on my leak line...

[-SWS]

Well, I managed almost 7 hours of (interrupted) mask sleep time last night with the Swift LT for Her! I was pleasantly surprised that I could keep it on so long.

...If I hadn't made this "public commitment" and gotten this support, I wouldn't have worn the mask last night, as I had to be up early, and fear of trashing my sleep further would have made me skip a night. So thanks again!!

That alone makes this thread worthwhile IMO.

Some of my AHI was attributable to centrals that I think registered after I woke up, got up, and wasn't yet asleep.

Looking at where your centrals occurred in the graph above, I also suspect they are wake-related.

I can't tell if my FLs are any better than they were at 4 or 5cm using the Activa-LT...perhaps slightly.

Resmed seems to have scored your FL a teensie weensie bit darker or denser during your 4cm baseline night (4/5) than last night (4/7):



There's still plenty of potentially-disruptive FL, though.

[-SWS]

This brings up 2 questions the we need data on:
How high does the APAP go if you let respond to those flow limitations the way it is programmed to? No saying this is a preferred therapy mode, just wondering about the facts.
and:
Whe the pressure is higher, do you see any change in the flow limitations - do some breaths eventually round out?

A third question: Do you have the same flow limitations when you're awake?

Good questions, ozij. I'm also waiting to see how SU's upcoming pressure experiments work toward answering questions one and two above. Right now that third question is the only one I believe we have an answer for. And last night's S9 graph demonstrates the answer even more neatly than the first example graph I posted:




I'm guessing SU might re-encounter these two HUGE hurdles for us to collectively help her with and cheer her past:
1) the mask/face hurdle, and
2) the pressure-tolerance hurdle

Fortunately for SU there is no better CPAP support team than cpaptalk...

[SleepingUgly]

This is last night's data. I had aerophagia at about 3:30am, and I felt I was mouth leaking in the morning, but not right before I took the mask off. It was with the Swift LT for Her on 6cm, without my custom nightguard that I always sleep with.



Do you think I'm leaking too much?

[rested gal]

Do you think I'm leaking too much?

I don't think so. The leak rate got a little ragged (but not terrible) for a couple of hours near morning, then leveled back out. Leak line looked fine most of the night.

I don't think those spiky couple of hours were bad enough to cause any treatment problem. But.... if the jumpy leaks during those "near morning" couple of hours were causing an ultra sensitive sleeper to have arousals due to noise produced by the leaks or from feeling puffs of air...even if the person wasn't consciously aware of the arousals... the increased leaks could have been disrupting the longest REM which usually occurs near morning. No way to know just from machine data if either of those things were happening - arousals from leak noise, or interruptions to REM.

[robysue]

SU,

Just stopping by to wish you luck.

Personally, I think the leak line looks pretty decent---as long as those couple of visible leaks didn't disturb your sleep too much.

robysue

[SleepingUgly]

I was waking up repeatedly with my mouth dry, so I think it was disturbing my sleep. The night before (or was it the night before that? or both?) I was waking up feeling the air escaping in little "blips" from my mouth, as well as getting a dry mouth.

[SleepingUgly]

This is last night's data, with the Swift LT for Her on APAP 6-8. I am very tired today. I had lots of awakenings, including some dry mouth, but I had lots of awakenings other nights as well. I may have gotten a bit less sleep than in recent nights, but not a small amount. There is so much variability to my EDS that it's hard to make too much of any one day, but I am a little discouraged by this as I had been feeling better the last few days on CPAP (even with disturbed sleep), albeit not as good as needed.

[-SWS]

Whe the pressure is higher, do you see any change in the flow limitations - do some breaths eventually round out?

So far the answer to that question seems to be yes, ozij...

Below we have ResScan FL scoring using 4cm CPAP on 4-5-11 and 5cm CPAP on 4-7-11:


I just performed a screen grab of SU's post above, and cropped last night's 6cm-to-8cm APAP for comparison:


SU, do you want to run that same APAP pressure one more night for comparison? Ideas from others...

[SleepingUgly]

Uh oh! I didn't realize EPR was set to 3 last night, so I changed too many variables: I switched from CPAP 6.0 to APAP 6-8, and I inadvertently added EPR of 3. Today was not a good day, but perhaps that's unrelated to either of these changes.

Any advice for tonight?

[SleepingUgly]

And let me also ask, how does one determine whether EPR is useful therapy? Or is it purely a comfort feature and if you can exhale against the pressure, you don't use it, and if you can't, you do? I guess I'm wondering how we'd know if it's helping or hurting me.

[rested gal]

And let me also ask, how does one determine whether EPR is useful therapy? Or is it purely a comfort feature and if you can exhale against the pressure, you don't use it, and if you can't, you do? I guess I'm wondering how we'd know if it's helping or hurting me.

I'd regard it more as a comfort feature although using it can, in some circumstances, affect therapy. For example if the pressure that EPR drops down to during exhaling was not enough to keep the airway open enough to get another inhalation started when you were ready to breathe in again, that could affect therapy...letting apneas or hypopneas sneak in.

But for your purposes, with the low pressures you're using, I'd think EPR would be merely a comfort feature. If you can breathe out easily against your pressure, then turning EPR off, or setting it just on "1", or setting it for "ramp" only might be fine for you. One thing about trying EPR "off"... the first few breaths might make you think, "Oh, it's kind'a hard to breathe out...I guess I DO need EPR." Give it more than just 5 or 6 times of breathing in / breathing out. It may very well be that after just a minute of breathing with EPR "off" you suddenly realize, "Hey, this is easy...not at all like the first few breaths."

[DoriC]

My husband kind of "pants" and breathes fast when I first turn the machine on but after a few breaths he slows down and then he's fine with it. He doesn't use Flex.

[SleepingUgly]

Last night didn't go well. I couldn't fall asleep for a long period of time, and when I eventually did, I kept waking up, but for longer periods of time than the usual CPAP transient arousals of late. I eventually stopped using the CPAP at 4:30am because I had to be up early and had barely slept. I'll post the data later, but unless we can tell when I was asleep and when I wasn't, I bet the data will be meaningless. I started the night on 7cm straight, but since I wasn't sleeping and my stomach felt a little "odd", I turned EPR on to 1.

One of the things I'm battling is my tendency toward delayed phase (not sure I merit a diagnosis). My body gravitates toward going to bed later and waking up later, but my life requires me to get up early on some days. I know I should maintain the same wake-sleep schedule, although it's not easy for me to do so.