Newbie and using OSCAR - SUPER LOST and looking for advice
Hello all, sorry in advance for the length of this! I am not quite a month into this journey. I started down a YouTube rabbit hole as my medical device company/therapist basically took my money and sent me out the door and have given me the runaround regarding some simple questions/requests.
IN THE MEANTIME - I have purchased a SD card (NOT a Resmed, though they say you can only use one of their cards. Shame on them!) and have downloaded OSCAR and have one week of generic data prior to the SD card and two and a half weeks of data from the card - all loaded into OSCAR.
I honestly am not sure what I'm looking at when I look at my graphs. It doesn't look good. I see lots of people post about needing help with their AHI in the 1-2 range, which concerns me a bit because I've been between low 4's and high 9's and in general have been in the 5-6 range.
I saw a video titled with something about 4-20 and almost skipped it because I thought it was suggesting an "herbal therapy" to treat apnea, which seemed counter-intuitive!
I discovered that those are the pressure presets and saw that you should check your pressure report and adjust the pressure accordingly.
When I went into the clinical settings on my machine, I saw that my therapist had left all the factory settings, including 4-20 and not even entering that I am using a full face mask vs the factory default of pillows. My prescription was for 15 or 16 pressure.
Based on my studies, I had seen in multiple places a consensus that ramp and one other setting were no-good, so I turned those off. I also changed my max pressure to 17 as I noticed that when it was 4-20 it got as high as 18 but kept in mind my Dr. prescribed something in the 15 or 16 range. Obviously 4 was my low, but I was consistently at 9-10 in the medium range, so set my low to 8 and then bumped it to 12 and think I might have gone too far.
Initially I was having a lot of leaks - I think I have that under control now, even with the increased pressure, with the exception of last night when I bumped up that bottom pressure.
I appear to be having a fair number of Clear Airway and Hypopnea events, and also a fair amount of Obstructive Apneas, too. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on how I can drive these events and my AHI score down.
If someone who knows what all these graphs mean, I would GREATLY appreciate some input and ideas on how to improve my therapy. Thanks in advance!
IN THE MEANTIME - I have purchased a SD card (NOT a Resmed, though they say you can only use one of their cards. Shame on them!) and have downloaded OSCAR and have one week of generic data prior to the SD card and two and a half weeks of data from the card - all loaded into OSCAR.
I honestly am not sure what I'm looking at when I look at my graphs. It doesn't look good. I see lots of people post about needing help with their AHI in the 1-2 range, which concerns me a bit because I've been between low 4's and high 9's and in general have been in the 5-6 range.
I saw a video titled with something about 4-20 and almost skipped it because I thought it was suggesting an "herbal therapy" to treat apnea, which seemed counter-intuitive!
I discovered that those are the pressure presets and saw that you should check your pressure report and adjust the pressure accordingly. When I went into the clinical settings on my machine, I saw that my therapist had left all the factory settings, including 4-20 and not even entering that I am using a full face mask vs the factory default of pillows. My prescription was for 15 or 16 pressure.
Based on my studies, I had seen in multiple places a consensus that ramp and one other setting were no-good, so I turned those off. I also changed my max pressure to 17 as I noticed that when it was 4-20 it got as high as 18 but kept in mind my Dr. prescribed something in the 15 or 16 range. Obviously 4 was my low, but I was consistently at 9-10 in the medium range, so set my low to 8 and then bumped it to 12 and think I might have gone too far.
Initially I was having a lot of leaks - I think I have that under control now, even with the increased pressure, with the exception of last night when I bumped up that bottom pressure.
I appear to be having a fair number of Clear Airway and Hypopnea events, and also a fair amount of Obstructive Apneas, too. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on how I can drive these events and my AHI score down.
If someone who knows what all these graphs mean, I would GREATLY appreciate some input and ideas on how to improve my therapy. Thanks in advance!
