07-09-2023, 08:07 PM
Muggzy's Therapy Thread - My quest for relief
Greetings, and thanks for what looks like a wonderful and helpful community! For the first time in way too long, I feel hopeful that I can make a significant positive change in my life (after lurking on the forums for the last week, lol).
I am a morbidly obese 50+ year old white male who was diagnosed with OSA more than twenty years ago.
I have had two sleep studies, neither of them recent, and was never given any data (nor really much information at all, really) from the studies, but was told at the time that I had mild sleep apnea.
I was prescribed a no-frills brick CPAP machine that could only be configured by the physician or technician, and the experience of using it with their chosen settings made me feel so claustrophobic that I gave up after about a month or two of inconsistent use both times.
In the time since, I've gained a ton of weight and been diagnosed with COPD as well. My health and energy had been slowly but steadily declining until 2020, when I caught COVID twice, and has been going downhill even faster since.
I recently purchased an "overnight" pulse oximeter with data logging, which showed that my saturation was dropping as low as 85% while sleeping, with a high number of ODI3 / ODI4 events each hour, which freaked me out enough to schedule an appointment with a new sleep doc.
The new doctor quite reasonably wants me to have another sleep study done, but the insurance company will only pay for an in-lab study and those are apparently in high demand with none being available for months. I will be scheduling one at the earliest possible opportunity.
Given that, and being in possession of a nearly unused ResMed AirSense 10 Autoset, I would like to see if it's possible to treat my sleep apnea to some degree myself in the interim, because I've never felt worse and the idea of waiting for months just to get started is unbearable. I'm not expecting miracles from going this route, but I would be incredibly thankful for any improvement at all.
So my question to all of you fine folks is this: given that I don't have a recent sleep study to provide guidance on a good set of initial parameters, is there a good set of generic parameters that I could use as a starting point?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
I am a morbidly obese 50+ year old white male who was diagnosed with OSA more than twenty years ago.
I have had two sleep studies, neither of them recent, and was never given any data (nor really much information at all, really) from the studies, but was told at the time that I had mild sleep apnea.
I was prescribed a no-frills brick CPAP machine that could only be configured by the physician or technician, and the experience of using it with their chosen settings made me feel so claustrophobic that I gave up after about a month or two of inconsistent use both times.
In the time since, I've gained a ton of weight and been diagnosed with COPD as well. My health and energy had been slowly but steadily declining until 2020, when I caught COVID twice, and has been going downhill even faster since.
I recently purchased an "overnight" pulse oximeter with data logging, which showed that my saturation was dropping as low as 85% while sleeping, with a high number of ODI3 / ODI4 events each hour, which freaked me out enough to schedule an appointment with a new sleep doc.
The new doctor quite reasonably wants me to have another sleep study done, but the insurance company will only pay for an in-lab study and those are apparently in high demand with none being available for months. I will be scheduling one at the earliest possible opportunity.
Given that, and being in possession of a nearly unused ResMed AirSense 10 Autoset, I would like to see if it's possible to treat my sleep apnea to some degree myself in the interim, because I've never felt worse and the idea of waiting for months just to get started is unbearable. I'm not expecting miracles from going this route, but I would be incredibly thankful for any improvement at all.
So my question to all of you fine folks is this: given that I don't have a recent sleep study to provide guidance on a good set of initial parameters, is there a good set of generic parameters that I could use as a starting point?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
![[Image: kJs959p.jpg]](https://i.imgur.com/kJs959p.jpg)
