Might Quit APAP Therapy

Took me about a week to feel anything. I still don't get no burst of energy. What I do get is endurance and I am no longer fatigued even after waking up from 10 hours of sleep.

If you think your body works better with less oxygen while you sleep, then go for it.

you mentioned paxil. is it possible you're still dealing with depression? the exhaustion you describe could very well be a symptom of untreated depression as well. i wish you the best of luck and hope you're on your way to finding answers and feeling better.

Mozart, please consider changing your way of thinking. It's only been 10 days - I've been at this for two years and I still have days I wake up dragging... but...those days are becoming less and less.

IMHO, success with XPAP therapy is largely your attitude towards it - if all you're going to do is find fault with every little aspect, then of course you're going to fail.

Start reading posts on this forum about HOW to fix leaks, sleeping positions, improve sleep hygiene etc. etc. MOST here struggled at first - and I'm not talking 10 short nights - in my case it was months. Despite this, I haven't missed one whole night since the start and was sleeping the whole night on CPAP within a month.

I understand you are stressed, tired, depressed and possibly suffering other health issues - as many of us are also, but spending time here working through your issues ONE AT A TIME, ONE DAY AT A TIME - you WILL succeed if you set your mind to it. I most certainly would have failed without the support and advice from the people here who've been there, done that, worked through it and passed on their experience and knowledge.

Please - hang in there - it WILL get better.

Cheers,
xena

sleepnasta wrote:you mentioned paxil. is it possible you're still dealing with depression? the exhaustion you describe could very well be a symptom of untreated depression as well. i wish you the best of luck and hope you're on your way to finding answers and feeling better.

no im not depressed. I have big plans and ambitions and look forward to life, I just have zero energy to do it!
The whole Paxil thing is a thing of the past for me, I successfully climbed that mountain... only to find a new
mountain to climb (sleep apnea)

xenablue wrote:Mozart, please consider changing your way of thinking. It's only been 10 days - I've been at this for two years and I still have days I wake up dragging... but...those days are becoming less and less.

Cheers,
xena

If you've been on this for 2 years and still have some bad days, then I don't think xPAP will help all that much. 24 months is an awfully long time.
If you're starting to feel a bit better after all that time, then it's probably due to other factors like less stress, losing weight, exercising more, diet changes,
secondary health condition, etc.

Some other factor must have changed for you to have more good days than bad. I don't think it's realistic to have to use an xPAP for 24 months
and then assume that is what helped with the fatigue, sleep debt be darned.

Mozart22 wrote: if I end up as one of the unlucky ones who keep using the APAP every single night, achieve low AHI numbers, normal leak rates, and yet still feel exhausted, then I have the CHOICE to sleep tired without a machine versus sleeping tired with a machine.

Yes, you will have a choice.

If several months were to pass and I still feel that way, or worse even more tired, then i have the CHOICE to get off it and continue
being tired but without a mask on my face and a machine blowing air into me.

Yes, you will have a choice.

I think you always have a choice. But if you're going to choose to give this a crack, you have a choice about whether to start a new thread and post your data so some of the knowledgeable folks here can give you advice about tweaking your settings, or whether to just do nothing. It's possible you'll feel better doing nothing but just sleeping with it. But it's also possible you need to make some adjustments to the treatment to get the most out of it.

Personally I wouldn't expend a lot of energy debating whether you have a choice. No one thinks you don't have a choice, it's just that some people feel the choice is more obvious than others here feel it is.

Mozart22 wrote:

sleepnasta wrote:you mentioned paxil. is it possible you're still dealing with depression? the exhaustion you describe could very well be a symptom of untreated depression as well. i wish you the best of luck and hope you're on your way to finding answers and feeling better.

no im not depressed. I have big plans and ambitions and look forward to life, I just have zero energy to do it!
The whole Paxil thing is a thing of the past for me, I successfully climbed that mountain... only to find a new
mountain to climb (sleep apnea)

i'm sorry if i offended you with my comment. i wasn't insinuating that you don't have ambition or plans for your life. just crossed my mind since you mentioned being off the paxil.

Mozart22 wrote:
The second point is that there are several people who say they've tried xPAP for MONTHS or sometimes years with no improvement
in energy. That's another problem. My point being, if I end up as one of the unlucky ones who keep using the APAP every single night,
achieve low AHI numbers, normal leak rates, and yet still feel exhausted, then I have the CHOICE to sleep tired without a machine
versus sleeping tired with a machine.

As I said before, I realize xPAP is about more than just fatigue. It's also about heart health, organ health, etc. But my number one reason I got
a sleep study and an APAP was to have enough energy to hold a job and socialize a bit and not feel exhausted all the time.
If several months were to pass and I still feel that way, or worse even more tired, then i have the CHOICE to get off it and continue
being tired but without a mask on my face and a machine blowing air into me.

I made the analogy before: if you are prescribed a pill, and after taking the pill over and over you still don't feel better, why keep taking that
pill?

Pill is not a good analogy, Think broken leg. After I fell off the stairs and got my cast on, walking was more difficult for weeks! It was exhausting dragging the thing around, it itched, my arms felt like they were never going to be the same again, it itched, I felt dirty not being able to shower properly and it itched. I never did manage to go up and down the stairs with the thing. Luckily it healed. I had a friend who had polio, she wore a brace on her leg. After a lot of practice she learned to walk with it. Eventually she out did me in playing baseball, but she fell a lot the first few months.

Feeling tired is one symptom, only one. My mother takes pills and insulin for her diabetes, they don't help that much, they haven't cured her but she keeps taking it, we keep working on adjusting them to make them work.

Mozart22,

I can see from your replies to the posts above that have been given to you, to help you, to encourage you, that you seem to already have your mind made up on quitting PAP therapy. Your focus seems to be only on the negative. Maybe you are not yet at the point to accept that you need this therapy no matter what! At one time I was the same way. It took me over 15 years of suspecting that I had Sleep Apnea, with the last 5 - 6 years being the most severe (my diagnosis before starting PAP treatment being a AHI of 78, my O2 desaturations 74%). My wife pleaded with me for longer than I can remember to do something, anything. She knew eventually that she would come out to the living room floor where I had slept for the last 15 years and find me dead. I had nowhere to go but up, as the bottom dwelling of severe S A had almost completed its deadly work. If you are young then maybe you will get along for a while, but eventually things will get worse! If your not so young then your body with years of untreated S A will fail you sooner than later! My experience with the downward spiral of SA is not the exception but the norm. Learn from our mistakes of denial and procrastination, before you are doomed to repeat them. I now wish I could go back in time and talk to that guy that had just spent his first night on the living room floor and talk some sense into him! All of that wasted time and damage to my health...so completely unnecessary!

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
Thomas A. Edison

Giving up represents a choice you make when you decide not to take action on something over which you actually do have control.
Darren L. Johnson

Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
Marilyn vos Savant

Today I've been feeling so tired from the moment I woke up, it has me yearning for the days when I didn't use CPAP.
I was tired back then too, and my energy levels were nowhere near normal. But I at least was able to get some things done.
Now, I'm tired from start to finish.

I figured it might take a while to notice plenty of energy, but I did not expect things to get worse.
That's why I've been complaining and feeling so negative. It's not because I'm not seeing instant results, but rather
because I was in a bad situation which is now a horrible situation in terms of energy and fatigue.

I know some of you don't like my pill analogy and compare it to walking with a cast, but here is another
analogy for you! :

Suppose you have trouble falling asleep, and like many people, you take Ambien or something of that nature.
Instead of falling asleep and staying asleep, you notice the Ambien actually worsens your insomnia, despite trying it every
night for more than a week.

Would you continue taking it? (I do not use any sleeping pills, but I think this is a good analogy. You start something looking for relief,
but much to your horror your problem has worsened instead of improved)

OK, you've convinced me. You should totally quit.

Or you could post your data and let the smart people here help you.

Your choice.

P.S. See, I told you that you have choices.

I have to say that if I were you, I'd be posting my data and discussing it, rather than focusing on how tired I was. Instead of deciding to work with it and try to make it better, you're putting your energy into complaining and coming up with analogies that would justify quitting. And I'd be discussing it with my doctors (sleep and others) as well, to see what other things might be playing into your condition than just sleep apnea.

You can say over and over that you're tired, but if you put that energy into looking at what's going on, improvement might actually be achieved. Or at least an understanding that it might be a matter of just giving it more time. But you've got to move from focusing on the negative and thinking up new analogies to justify quitting to actually doing something to start feeling better.

You can do it, no one else can do it for you.

I hope that I'm not coming across mean in this. I've learned over the years that one can dissipate one's energy focusing on the negative side of things and just feel increasingly bad about the situation. Or one can focus one's energy on the positive, creative side, and get on with working on the issues and moving forward, and get to a much better place.

Mozart22 wrote:

sleepnasta wrote:you mentioned paxil. is it possible you're still dealing with depression? the exhaustion you describe could very well be a symptom of untreated depression as well. i wish you the best of luck and hope you're on your way to finding answers and feeling better.

no im not depressed. I have big plans and ambitions and look forward to life, I just have zero energy to do it!
The whole Paxil thing is a thing of the past for me, I successfully climbed that mountain... only to find a new
mountain to climb (sleep apnea)

Hi Mozart22!

Continuing my usual efforts to eat well and move well I added eucapnic breathing retraining and stress reduction. My pressure need has moved down from 15 to 8 cm/H2O in a year. If you had a similar 9 cm/H2O change you would not "need" a PAP at all!!

For you I think it is solve the physiological problem - no problem.

Have a great week!

Todzo