1 week with success, questions and frustration

[Denial Dave]

I have completed 1 week with my lovely machine and feel the need to share;

Success:

#1I'm averaging over 6 hours per night of usage
#2 need for late afternoon naps are gone
#3 AHI is about 12, I was diagnosed with 31 so it is an improvement
#4 middle of the night pee breaks are gone
#5 sleephead software is awesome

Frustration:

#1 can't seem to get a handle on humidification settings
one night a setting is perfect & the next night, I have major dry mouth issues... no weather changes to attribute it to

#2 my lungs feel like they have run a marathon when I wake up from my pressure settings.

#3 moderate burping in the mornings from gupling air...

questions

sleepy head shows that I have large spikes in obstructions that are clearly associated with leaks.

The problem is: those leaks are between 1 and 3AM.... when I am pretty sure that I am asleep
I go to bed at 10PM and have little or no leaks.

how do I resolve leak issues that occur that I am not aware of during sleep?

if I could resolve those issues, my AHI would be about 4-5

all things considered, I am on the road to improvement

Dave

[Pugsy]

Could you please post an image of the daily detailed graphs for a night with the leak that you are talking about?
Be sure to include the colored bar stuff on the left side so we can see the AHI and breakdown.

Don't know how to post an image? We talked about it in this thread.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=81072&p=737779#p737779

[ycartf]

how do I resolve leak issues that occur that I am not aware of during sleep?

Depends. Do you stay in one position during the night (side, back, etc)? And do you move from that position during the night (or do you know, or spouse know)?

Some leak issues can be from tightening straps TOO tight for some people, but from the seal you go to sleep with that does not sound likely. I would guess positioning. I had trouble with leaks for a while after I first started recording data. I noticed that they were mainly during times when I would roll from my usual side-sleeping position onto my back. This could compromise my seal, as I have a relatively loose fit seal that works well with my face into the pillow on the right side (side I usually sleep on). I trained myself to not roll onto my back (which also increases the chance of obstructions with the tongue and/or tissues in the oropharynx) by wearing a fanny pack full of tennis balls around my chest. This gave me a "Quasimodo" kind of hunchbank lump on my back and would prompt me to stay on my side if I did start to roll onto my back during the night. But I rarely have to use it now (after getting conditioned not to roll onto my back).

Hope you keep noticing improvement and never give up on it!

[Todzo]

I have completed 1 week with my lovely machine and feel the need to share;

Success:

#1I'm averaging over 6 hours per night of usage
#2 need for late afternoon naps are gone
#3 AHI is about 12, I was diagnosed with 31 so it is an improvement
#4 middle of the night pee breaks are gone
#5 sleephead software is awesome

Frustration:

#1 can't seem to get a handle on humidification settings
one night a setting is perfect & the next night, I have major dry mouth issues... no weather changes to attribute it to

#2 my lungs feel like they have run a marathon when I wake up from my pressure settings.

#3 moderate burping in the mornings from gupling air...

questions

sleepy head shows that I have large spikes in obstructions that are clearly associated with leaks.

The problem is: those leaks are between 1 and 3AM.... when I am pretty sure that I am asleep
I go to bed at 10PM and have little or no leaks.

how do I resolve leak issues that occur that I am not aware of during sleep?

if I could resolve those issues, my AHI would be about 4-5

all things considered, I am on the road to improvement

Dave

Hi Dave!

Not bad for a week in!

#1 & #2 I think are directly related. PAP pressure tends one toward breathing more. Breath more - dry things out. Breath more the lungs feel it. It takes time to establish new breathing reflexes that take into account the pressure.

Things I have found help:

Spend some quality time with the machine during the day. Spend some time laying in bed learning to breath quietly and gently with the machine. It helps me to add a pause between exhale and inhale. I listen to my heart - inhale during two beats, exhale for two or three beats, pause for two beats ... repeat. Also spend some time with distraction such as non-violent TV, or music, or read a book. This is also a good time to adjust straps (they constantly change) and check out how mask fits moving head and body.

Reduce Stress

Do Aerobic exercise and add a bit of interval training exercise. If you do not exercise currently consult with doc first (I guess we have to say that). At any rate, start slow and minimul and build up.

Stay away from violent media.

The few times I have had burping it helped to sleep on my stomach, or at least mostly on my stomach, and I used a pillow to put a bit more pressure on the actual stomach area. Over time you might consider doing more but smaller meals. If you have a smaller stomach there is less area to inflate with - less square inches, so to speak, to press against the pressure of skin bone and muscle.

Have a great week!

Todzo

[Denial Dave]

Hi all

as soon as I can figure out how to clip and post, I will... I'm still running windows XP.

Last night was a terrible night for dry mouth... I know I woke up a few times and worked on getting my mouth moist to overcome the dryness.

H5i settings were at 1.0 and had been perfect the previous night.... On prior nights with it set at 2 or higher, it felt like I had condensation on the side of the mask near my cheeks.

I'm wondering if the reported obstructions were actually my efforts to overcome the dryness and the reported leaks are the system noticing my mouth closures.

sort of chicken or egg...
LOL

all of this great information is from sleepyhead, because without it I would have no clue of what was going on!!!!

I have not heard from my sleep doc or the DME since they gave me the machine.... not a single phone call asking "how's it going?"

re: chest and lung pains. I ran cross country during high school and college after running, we used to do "cool down walks".. After I got up this morning, it felt like i needed to talk a walk to cool down from the sleep efforts.


it's only been a week and things are going well & my wife is happy again.... no snoring.

thanks everyone

Dave

[Pugsy]

Windows XP screen shot thing involves using Paint to crop and save.
Might be easier to just use a screen capture program.
ScreenHunter is free...don't need the paid for version.
There are others out there to try though.

If your events are showing up about the same time as you know you were awake fiddling with the mask then it is possible that the machine has mistaken some awake irregular breathing with a sleep apnea event. The machine doesn't know if you are asleep or not and it can and will flag some awake stuff. Makes things look worse than they really are.

It is common for newbies to have fragmented sleep due to mask fit, leaks and general hyper awareness to all this so it is also common for some of the events that get flagged to make things look worse than they are.
So try not to be too alarmed right now about what you may see.
If you wake up to fiddle with the mask try to catch a glimpse of the clock if you can so that you can evaluate the reports and that time frame. If things look really good for 2 or 3 hours and then things go all to hell in about 15 minutes and you know you woke up about that time to fiddle with the mask then there is a good chance that the events that got scored were awake events and we don't worry about awake events at all.

[zoocrewphoto]

Which type of hose are you using? If you don't have the climateline hose, perhaps you should use a hose cozy. I think you probably need a much higher humidifier setting. You have a high pressure setting, so a lot of airflow going through.

I had a lot of dry mouth at first. I use a full face mask, and I am a mouth breather. After experimenting, I settled in with a setting of 5 for my humidifier and the temp ranges from 72-75. I do still occasionally get dry mouth, but I believe it is caused by sleeping on my back. My jaw relaxes too much, opens too far, and my cheeks start flapping a bit. I also have more apneas on my back, so the pressure increases. Almost every time I wake up with dry mouth, I am aware that I am on my back. Fortunately, my asleep brain seems to be registering this fact as well, as I sleep less on my back than I used to before cap.

[Denial Dave]

I'm using the standard slimline hosing I'll give thought a hose cover. I