(04-30-2018, 06:39 PM)HopeCPAPHelps Wrote: Very new to CPAP therapy (using Airsense for 8 days now), I have so many many questions. Dont know where to begin.
Hello, Hope,
I'm also a newbie. Before I took the plunge into this forum and started reading up here about the hardware and the therapy fine-tuning and all the other gory but fascinating details, I browsed the books on sleep apnea that were available at my local large public library, not many (of course there's also Interlibrary Loan), and I did come away with one that is useful
despite being 15 years old. It is
Sleep Apnea: The Phantom of the Night by T. Scott Johnson, B. Gail Demko, Jerry Halberstadt, and William Broughton, third edition, 2003, published by New Technology in Onset, Massachusetts (gotta love the name of that town). If there exists an edition later than third (I'm too lazy to do a web search at the moment), then of course the latest is the one to go for.
I recommend that book, very much so, because everyone who is new to this needs an introduction, overview, a series of orientation lectures (which could be chapters in a book) to get started. This board and its wiki are exceptional, terrific, fabulous, beyond compare. They also have truckloads of information that is not available anywhere else. However, reading endless scrolls of text on a screen for hours and hours is vastly different from reading endless pages of any number of books: the screen reading is much more fatiguing, relatively very difficult on the eyes and the mind, compared to the traditional kind of reading on paper. (ObBoringOldFartGripe: I feel very sorry for today's college students who are basically forced to read endless scrolls of text on screens rather than on paper, for years, whether they choose to do it that way or not. They have no idea what they're missing.)
One of the first things that anyone will notice about that book now, and one of the big objections that people here might have to it, is that all of the information about CPAP hardware is out of date. But that's OK; it's not a big deal. Simply ignore it. Don't window-shop for a machine or a mask in a book that's that old (and in your case you have those items anyway), and instead just read all of the general information there about sleep apnea and CPAP therapy. Sure, there have been significant advances in that medical field over the last fifteen years, but I doubt that they've made most of that introductory information obsolete. A patient still goes through a sleep study of pretty much the same kind, is hooked up to the various sensors and then to an auto-titrating CPAP machine, eventually comes away with a prescription for an air pressure or range of pressures, and acquires a machine and a mask. Starting the actual CPAP therapy and getting accustomed to it and tuning it over the course of the first months are also basically the same
except that now the machines are smaller and much quieter and more capable, and the masks are smaller, lighter, and much easier to put up with. And there are vastly more choices of hardware in general, along with the analysis & graphing software.
So that book does provide a useful start. And of course if anyone wants to recommend others, more recent or better in general or both, I'm all ears for that and then all eyes for the particular books; I'd love to continue my apnea-and-CPAP education that way. Recommend away, please and thank you.
