Each day was worse than the next and the palpitations got worse. The ribs and sternum were very sore but would generally go away after a few hours of getting up. I could not take it
anymore so I came here to get some ideas. I needed to get the bottom of it and fix my problem.
First thing I did was learn how to hack my machine. I am using a Resmed autoset 10. Here is how one unlocks the clinical settings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHkJuuZuhfc.
Now I could see all the settings that were hidden from me and I could tweak them if needed. In order to ever think about tweaking them I needed to have my data and study it and understand
it. On these forums, I learned about OSCAR and downloaded it. After removing the memory chip from the cpap unit and downloading the data to OSCAR on my PC, I was ready to study the data.
God knows the doctors don't have time for this.
After studding the data from the three days I had really bad pain, the issue was plain as day. Each one of those days I had major mask leaks over 30. From the chart data, these leaks lasted for over
an hour while I was still asleep!
Gee, I wonder why I was so sore! To confirm this was causing the pain, I put my mask on and ran a mask fit test and then started moving around like I do when I sleep. The large leaking started right away and so did the pain and massive heart palpitations. I was doing this as an awake experiment. Since the mask was leaking so badly, it created a vacuum of space
where you could not breathe. So in order to breathe, your body had to work very hard to fight against the machine to breathe since all the breathable air was forced out through the leak!
This is what causes the pain and soreness. Your lungs are working overtime and so is your heart. They are all pounding on your ribs / chest. This causes the Costochondritis. Now we know the cause,
we can fix it.
I laid back down and put the full face mask back on and ran the mask fit test lying down. You have to run it lying down because of gravity! I moved into position #1 lying on my left side. The leak was massive.
One has to tighten the left strap until this leak is gone to zero. Move your head up and down to mimic sleeping movement. Tighten more if you need to stop the leak. Repeat the same procedure for lying on your
back and for lying on your right side. On the right side you tighten the right strap. On your back you tighten both straps. You may also have to move the mask up and down on your face as well. Basically do all
positions until there are no leaks for every body position. I recommend doing the fit every night before bed. Any leak is a bad leak IMHO. Ever since I did my leak fix, I have had zero leaks and no Costochondritis
or pain of any kind. No more headaches either. I do admit it took a few days for some of the pains to resolve 100% but they did.
I also suggest you study your charts and find out what the highest pressure your machine goes to every night without major leaks and set your highest pressure to a point or too higher. The reason for this is the mask
fit test works at the highest pressure you have set. 20 is usually way to much for most people and if your machine leaks the pressure will go higher pressures to compensate. This makes all the pain worse. It is better for
you to just be forced to wakeup and fix the issue. If you stop breathing for too long your body will wake you up.
Hopefully this will help any of you suffering the same issue. It is also interesting to note that this leaking problem also caused my frozen shoulder (left). My body seemed to know that if I moved during sleep, big
problems occurred so it kept me very still the best it could. Hence, it froze my shoulder. That is now fixed as well for the most part. Still needs some more therapy to unlock it 100%. The improvement of the
shoulder is at least 95%.
My only reason for writing this was in hopes that it would help people in a similar predicament. God Bless!
