Venting

This lack of quality sleep is killing me either way. I am finding it more difficult to sleep with the CPAP and mask, then without it. Without treatment, I am a mess. With treatment, I am waking up several times a night as well. It has been 3 or 4 weeks now. Now it is 3:30am and I have been up since 1am - cant get back to sleep so venting here on the forums. My doc is checking to see if all my settings are ok. When will I start sleeping and feeling refreshed?

I've been at this about four months, and I'm just starting to sleep 6-8 hours in one go and feel like I haven't traded one sleep disorder for another. Stick with it, you'll get there.

You may want to post some data here and let your fellow hoseheads look for problems too. While few of us have medical degrees or are sleep professionals, there are a lot of us here, and collectively, we've had just about every available problem with this therapy.

It may also help for you to wear the mask with the machine on during the day while awake. Try to do this a couple of times a day. It may help you get used to it sooner. It's hard to get used to this new way of sleeping, but ya gotta keep at it.
Do post what machine and mask you are using along with any data you have. Forum folks are more than happy to try and help! Meanwhile, hang in there!

Brenda

You will need to give us much more information to receive help and advice here. But first....

To use the forum features fully, you need to register and log in. Once you do that, your username will be in blue and be clickable. Until you do that, your are very limited in what communication can transpire between you and other members.

Please take a minute to go up to the User Control Panel (under search, top left) and then to your Profile and then Edit Equipment. Choose your gear from the pull down menus and the choose to show those in TEXT, not pictures. This will put your equipment at the bottom of every post your write automatically, like mine below. Those with the same equipment can help you better than having to constantly ask you what you use!

You are clearly having issues with the therapy, but until we can help you pinpoint the problems and remedy them, you will not benefit much from your struggles. Once we know what machine, mask, pressure(s) you are using as well as if you have the software for your machine (assuming it is data capable), we can guide you to tweaking things to bring about effective treatment.

Looking forward to additional information from you soon!

Newbie25 wrote:This lack of quality sleep is killing me either way. I am finding it more difficult to sleep with the CPAP and mask, then without it. Without treatment, I am a mess. With treatment, I am waking up several times a night as well. It has been 3 or 4 weeks now. Now it is 3:30am and I have been up since 1am - cant get back to sleep so venting here on the forums. My doc is checking to see if all my settings are ok. When will I start sleeping and feeling refreshed?

The fit and adjustment of the mask is critical in cpap comfort. But unless you sign up and fill out your equipment you are SOL because we can't offer any advice.

Do you have software? Do you have a data capable machine?

It took 7 months and 5 different mask. The hybrid is working for me now however I still wake up to go to bathroom at least once. I have to adjust mask to stop leaking in early morning. I have a pad a cheek for straps and a mask liner that have helped for comfort and leaks. So many helpful suggestions on this forum. I have an auto adjust intellipap machine and had to adjust the lower and upper limits. My prescription pressure is 10 and my lower limit is 9 and upper is 18. I found that having my lower set close to my prescription pressure helped. also if you have c-flex or smart flex adjusting those for comfort is good to, however I found that I keep mine at one because the lapse in-between inhale and exhale is not good for me, but everyone is different.
Hope this helps

Newbie25 wrote:When will I start sleeping and feeling refreshed?

I was fully functional in the daytime pre-CPAP; some daily pain in my hands and feet, some minor, but chronic, fatigue issues, and NO daytime sleepiness at all. Felt like my sleep was OK, but not great. Most mornings I woke up in pain (hands and feet), but feeling more rested than when I had gone to bed, but not refreshed by any means. I only had the sleep test done because hubby insisted he'd seen me stop breathing at night.

I'm now almost 11 months into therapy.

It took between 9 1/2 and 10 months for me to start to feel as good (and sometimes better) than I felt pre-CPAP. Along the way I had to deal with an incredible crash and burn in terms of daytime functioning, tons of tears and plenty of hissy fits (often at 3:00 AM), a truly nasty insomnia monster (now mostly under control), two additional sleep tests, a change in machine from APAP to BiPAP, several pressure changes, grappling with getting my chronic migraines and vertigo under control, allergy issues, and plenty of sensory overload.

I still wake up 2--4 times each night, but now they're short wakes (5 minutes or less) that don't really disturb me.

I still only get 5 to 5 1/2 hours of sleep per night, but at least I'm now waking up feeling rested (most days) and even somewhat refreshed (some days). On my absolute best days, I now feel like I did in my early 40's---a decade ago. And I'm once again functioning reasonably well in the daytime (most days) in spite of only getting 5 to 5 1/2 hours of sleep.

Newbie25 wrote:This lack of quality sleep is killing me either way. I am finding it more difficult to sleep with the CPAP and mask, then without it. Without treatment, I am a mess. With treatment, I am waking up several times a night as well. It has been 3 or 4 weeks now. Now it is 3:30am and I have been up since 1am - cant get back to sleep so venting here on the forums. My doc is checking to see if all my settings are ok. When will I start sleeping and feeling refreshed?

How is the doc checking your settings? What machine do you use? Does it record efficacy data? If so, you probably should learn to check that data yourself---it's not that hard. If not, then how's the doc going to determine if your settings are ok?

As for the insomnia: Have you ever dealt with insomnia before? If so, what did you do to try to treat it and how successful were you at getting the insomnia under control? If not, you probably ought to add "talk to doc about insomnia issues" to the list of things you want to bring up to the doc's office---as in asking for more help than just verifying that the settings are correct.

There are a number of things that you can try for dealing with the insomnia. But you need to start NOW, before the insomnia monster gets even larger and starts to feed on all sorts of non-CPAP related things in your life as well as the more obvious and immediate CPAP-related sensory stimuli that make it difficult for you to fall asleep. For some ideas, read the Taming the CPAP Induced Insomnia Monster link in my signature.

Welcome newbie.

Whatever your problem, someone here has probably been through the same thing and has some advice.

Please sign up for an ID and fill in your equipment in your profile. There's a link at the end of this post telling you how.