New to Board and Sleep Apnea [masks, general info request]
Hi, I have just been diagnosed with sever sleep apnea and received a CPAP machine. I am trying to figure out what mask works for me and learn how to find information to help with this new journey. Any advice and links to the site information would be helpful. I have found the dictionary here, but trying to find out what I need to know and the new vocabulary on how to ask questions to get help. I am going to download Sleepyhead and read the Beginners Guide to Sleepyhead. I am so excited to find this site!
I am a mouth breather and I am still snoring in the mask. Is that normal or should snoring stop?
Thanks!!
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea
Welcome to the board! If your settings are correct on your machine, you should not be experiencing any loud snoring. For now...read, read and read up some more. There are lots of good resources here to help you learn all about your treatment. Rest assured that you have done the right thing to post here and take the first steps to learning all you can about Sleep Apnea. Your chances of success with the treatment will be much, much higher as a result.
A bit farther along, once you have installed Sleepyhead software (one of the many things you need to read about...) and used it to get some information from your machine. You can post the data here for others here to review and give you advice on correct settings.
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea
Welcome to the Apnea Board, we can and will help you on your journey.
I think that you have either the ResMed Airsense 10 AutoSet or the Autoset for Her, look at the lower right front of your machine. Let us know and please change your profile to reflect that because it will impact the advice that you will get.
Also your settings are 4-20 cmw which is wide open. Expect a recommendation to change that once you post your Sleepyhead charts. The Organization (see my signature) is important because many of the available charts are not important to most users. We will ask if needed. Many adults have issues with a min pressure of 4, if this fits you change the min to 6 cmw.
Masks, read the Mask Primer. Unfortunately masks are very personal and what works for one may not work for another. That said try masks from the smallest and least intrusive to the larger full face masks. Many here use the P10 Pillows, these are the smallest least intrusive of all the masks and rest on, NOT in, the nares of your nose. Then nasal masks fitting over our entire nose and finally the full face mask which fits over their mouth and nose.
Which mask is best? The one that works for you. There are many here that use a full face mask.
Still snoring in a mask, that likely means that your pressure is set too low.
Do you have a copy of your prescription? Your Sleep Study(s)? If not get them, you are entitled under Hippa. Please post a copy of your Sleep Study, a full copy, not just the summary. This will tell us a lot about what to expect.
Much good info is contained in my signature.
Fred
12-03-2018, 01:31 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-03-2018, 01:35 PM by Fats Drywaller.)
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea
Welcome to AB. It sounds like you have a good start and are finding the information you need. As you've probably seen, in the section of "Important Threads" here in the main forum, the ones to go for are "New to Apnea?" and "CPAP Clinician Setup Manuals". Also take a look at the wiki when you have time to browse, and read the Mask Primer there.
If you have a paper copy of the user's guide for your machine, that's good; if not, you can get a PDF of it from the Resmed web site. The manual that you'll get by following the directions on the "CPAP Clinician Setup Manuals" page here on AB is more advanced and has information about changing the settings in the "clinician mode" of the machine. That's the manual that the doctors & DMEs won't give you because you're merely a patient and if you have the advanced documentation then you might blow up the world.
It's important to get the exact model name of the machine and put it in your profile/sidebar. Same with the mask make & model, once you've got that figured out. Since you've listed a range of pressures, I assume your machine is an Airsense 10 Autoset or an Airsense 10 Autoset for Her. The name should be on the front of the machine.
That's just for starters. Happy sleeping! (That'll be once you have the machine's settings figured out & adjusted and are comfortable with the mask.)
12-03-2018, 01:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-03-2018, 01:36 PM by Fats Drywaller.)
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea
About posting the sleep study & prescription, of course all personal information should be blacked out (or redacted, if you want to get fancy). If you can do that digitally to a PDF or an image file, great; if not, the easiest way is to make a paper copy, scribble on it with a marker (or do some surgery with an X-Acto knife), and scan & post that.
12-03-2018, 02:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-03-2018, 02:11 PM by Fats Drywaller.)
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea [masks, general info request]
Apneaboard is somewhat odd in that there is a huge amount of useful information available in past discussions, going back years, but whenever you want something you have to dig for it by doing a lot of searching & browsing & reading & sorting/classifying, so it can get quite tiring. And time-consuming. The AB wiki is the place to look for permanently stored reference information, sort of like a collection of FAQs but not quite. IMO this place needs a good solid collection of FAQs, but the task of creating that is obviously intractable, the thirteenth labor of Hercules, so it'll never happen. And the result, if printed, would be a book many hundreds of pages long at a minimum. So the wiki is it.
The local search facility here rejects search terms of fewer than four characters. ISTR that the motive is to reduce the load on the underpowered & overworked server. For that reason and others, including a limit of one search per 20 seconds, it's often more useful to use an outside search engine. As an example, if you use Google, you can include site:apneaboard.com in the search terms to get only results from here, and intitle:"some phrase" to get only results that have the phrase in the title of the board post or wiki entry.
RE: New to Board and Sleep Apnea [masks, general info request]
(12-03-2018, 12:37 PM)Stella66 Wrote: Hi, I have just been diagnosed with sever sleep apnea and received a CPAP machine. I am trying to figure out what mask works for me and learn how to find information to help with this new journey. Any advice and links to the site information would be helpful. I have found the dictionary here, but trying to find out what I need to know and the new vocabulary on how to ask questions to get help. I am going to download Sleepyhead and read the Beginners Guide to Sleepyhead. I am so excited to find this site!
I am a mouth breather and I am still snoring in the mask. Is that normal or should snoring stop?
Thanks!!
Hi Stella66,
Welcome to Apnea Board!
Your profile states your pressure range is set to a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 20. This is considered a “wide open” setting, and the minimum pressure just may be too low. Most folk feel
“Air starved” if using that low of a pressure. It could be the reason for snoring. With that said, give it a few days, and then post a SleepyHead screenshot of the daily page. We can tell a lot from seeing your data. Use the links in my signature line to guide you.
Use the HELP link at the top right of page for many “how to” articles.
http://www.apneaboard.com/forums/misc.php?action=help
Finally, finding the mask that is right for you will probably be harder than getting used to therapy.
If you aren’t able to control mouth breathing, then a full face mask may be what you need.
There is a technique you can practice anytime, called the “Tongue Suck Technique.”
Try it, providing you have no medical reason for not breathing through your nose.
Tongue Suck Technique:
Place your tongue to the roof of your mouth with tip of tongue behind front teeth. Slowly suck upwards and back.
This places the tongue in a natural position, with the back of tongue sealing the back of the throat so that if you open your mouth/jaw while sleeping, no air will escape.
You can also try a “soft cervical collar” to help the jaw/mouth from falling open.
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