2 Year Mark - Giving up

General Discussion on any topic relating to CPAP and/or Sleep Apnea.
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Pugsy
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Joined: Thu May 14, 2009 9:31 am
Location: Missouri, USA

Re: 2 Year Mark - Giving up

Post by Pugsy » Mon Jun 10, 2013 6:00 pm

Your 95% leak numbers point to probably considerable time spent in large leak...how bad of large leak we can't see very well with the overview graphs but it looks like a lot of time spent well above 24 L/min..and that is where ResMed says that leaks above that line can start impacting therapy and very much above it (like in the 30 to 35 L/min range) the machine can actually miss scoring of events.
So I see at least one possible reason for not feeling as well as you hoped you would....leaks and possibly sub optimal therapy and/or maybe leaks disturbing sleep and anything that disturbs sleep can and will mess with how we feel the next day.
Your leak issues are far from small.....

There are also any number of other reasons why we don't feel as good as the numbers seem to say we should.
Meds, general health, insomnia, bed comfort, frequent awakenings, mask fit and comfort...and the list goes on and on.

You know what....after 4 years I still don't feel like running a marathon but I can say that at least I don't wake up feeling like I just ran a marathon. I have never really consistently woke up feeling the "miracle" that a lot of lucky people talk about. I have had a handful of close maybes but it didn't make this 60 year old body feel like 30 again...it just doesn't work that way.
The machine is designed to help fix the sleep apnea issues...the collapse of the airway and the drops in oxygen levels due to the collapse of the airway tissues. It doesn't fix issues unrelated to OSA and there is a very long list of sleep and sleep disordered breathing issues that can also be going on. The machine can't fix what it wasn't designed to fix and not everything should be lumped in to the OSA basket no matter how much we want to blame OSA for everything that is wrong with how we might feel.

Early on in my therapy even though I wasn't feeling the "miracle"...I was good with thinking of using cpap as preventative therapy...preventing that stroke...preventing that heart attack...preventing the damage that OSA does to the other organs of the body...preventing my greatest fear which is the heart attack or stroke that comes up short of death and I am a vegetable. That is my greatest fear and if I have to use this mask and machine every day of my life and even if I don't feel the "miracle" I am good with maybe preventing something really bad from happening.
It's really no different than taking a little aspirin a day to help prevent heart attack or maybe lessen the damage....or taking a little pill to help lower blood pressure or cholesterol or whatever...preventative therapy...we can't always see the results in a way that is easily measured...but the results are there just the same.

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