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Well, you still have positional apnea, even with the collar. I tried various collars, then decided I wanted to try something different. I bought a child-sized pillow, as they are lower and smaller than regular pillows, and mine has a raised front and back edge that keeps my head tipped back slightly and solves positional apnea completely for me. My pillow is no longer made, but Amazon has one that looks like it might accomplish the same thing. Here's a link:
07-16-2024, 04:38 AM (This post was last modified: 07-16-2024, 04:42 AM by drowsyboy.)
RE: drowsyboy - Treatment advice
I have absolutely no idea I had a few too many last week and scored my lowest AHI ever of 0.3 during a 9 hour sleep.
Thanks for the tip Deborah, I think this is worth trying for sure. I will see what I can find where I live. I have read from another post that somebody has solved this also by buying memory foam sheets and adding them under their normal low pillow until they found the right amount of height. We have a few different pillows around the house here including a "cervical" style one that tips the head slightly also. I will try for a couple of nights each and then I will order something if I have no luck.
Deborah has sound advice. Many of us go through several variations of mask, pillow, collar and other accoutrements of the sleep ritual.
Do import the Wellue data, it will add another dimension to resolving AHI issues. After I started scoring 0.00 AHI's I was able to tweak and tune from the SpO2 Drops (SD) and Pulse Change (PC) events. Which helped immensely, until allergy season hit, then I had to start tweaking and tuning again.
Could you grab the bottom of your graphs and move them up a little, so the Flow Limits graph comes into view. Although the FL score is very respectable, some information can be gained from them.
That cervical pillow sounds potentially interesting, a couple of family members sleep with travel pillows that have the same effect of positioning the head tilted back.
Yes, travel pillows are smaller and flatter than other pillows too. If you can find one with a raised front to keep your head tipped back, that might work.
Thanks UnicornRider! Here is last nights data with the flow limit graph included. I bumped up the pressure to 14 to see if it would make any difference but results seem to be quite similar. I tried the previous night with the cervical pillow and results were also basically the same so no luck there. I will continue to try different pillow combinations, with and without the cervical collar to see if it makes any difference.
Deborah, I will try a travel pillow also. Thanks for the suggestion. I've nearly tried all of my pillows at home now without much luck. Is it usually the case that a taller or shorter pillow is more helpful?
Hello. Back again after a long time. I've generally felt pretty ok again until recently. I've managed to get my events down to around 1.1 for the past month. I stopped taking some medication which the Dr prescribed to me when I got my CPAP to see if it would help with the tiredness (citalopram), and my events dropped quite a lot after a week. After doing some reading I found that it can cause higher events in some people. I also switched my EPR to ramp only which seemed to help also.
So here is why I have come back for some advice, even though my events are frequently at 0.3 (My typical range is 0.3 - 1.5) a night I am still having frequent o2 drops and spikes in my heart rate while I'm sleeping which is leaving me feeling really unrefreshed and just quite on edge when I wake up in the morning and throughout the day. As you can see on my chart here my o2 is dropping to 89% even without apnea events being registered.
My setup is a soft cervical collar with a full face mask. I'm in pretty decent shape and definitely not over weight so that's not an issue here. My mask doesn't usually have this much leaks by the way, last night was an exception, I just had to tighten it up and they went away.
Any advice is hugely appreciated! I'm getting a bit desperate here, my adherence is perfect and I sleep really comfortably with my cpap but I still feel terrible.
I had a few too many last week and scored my lowest AHI ever of 0.3 during a 9 hour sleep.
