Bondage Anyone? An Approach to Positional Apnea

Wow, who knew there was a name for that. I've been sleeping in a modified Falcon position for years! I usually have both arms up though, with the lower arm under the pillow or my face. (The tech just looooved my hands being up near my face and the wires during my first sleep study!)

For a while, I was trying to sleep on my back because my chiropractor said it was ideal for my sore, frequently misaligned hips. Side-sleeping is the worst position for that. I found the semi-side, semi-belly position worked well when pregnant and in general for taking some of the pressure off my hips without putting too much pressure on my stomach. Awakening the GERD monster is never good.

REMEMBER - NEVER FORGET YOUR SAFE WORD!!!!

Maybe you could add a discipline to the bondage and get full B&D treatment. Make a gadget that hits you with a riding crop when you have an apnea.

And for those who have trouble taking their mask off at night, try a variant of this mask.

Wow, archangle, quite the mask. GACK!

Last night this continued to work for me. I did go briefly onto my back for 4 minutes somehow, popped 3 OA's and then I returned to my tummy. The accelerometer tells me the *night before last* I changed positions about 24 times. Last night only about 13, so more settled sleep as well. Other than that I had 3 other OAs and 3 hypopneas, mostly movement related, an AHI of 1.37, about 1/2 normal for me lately.

Just read this post and I can relate to all I read. Sleeping on my back was not an option for most of my adult life as I would just stop breathing (didn't know why at the time but it was OSA's). So I took to sleeping on my side. Started with my right side. OK for a few years, but had increasingly more problems with OSA's. My wife convinced my to start sleeping on my left side and her observation was that if I stayed on my left side, she could get some sleep because my snoring was minimal and the OSA's were almost non-existent.

Since then, I have developed a bad hip as a result of a car accident when I was 15. Coupled with increasing problems with the sleep apnea, which I was just officially diagnosed with in May this year, ( I am reminded almost daily about how stubborn I have been, I'm 58, been suffering for 40 years) I have been confined to sleeping on my back with a bed wedge (at about 45 degrees) or in a recliner. Since starting CPAP 3 weeks ago, I can now sleep in the same bed with my wife. I have been warned that sleeping upright is not good on the back but for now it's all I have.

All this to say I agree that probably in many cases the position we sleep in has a direct bearing on apnea's, especially OSA's.

There's my 2 cents worth. Would not have continued with my CPAP machine this long if I had not found this forum. Thanks to ALL!