Background: I am now about 5 weeks in on my DS 2, now set at 6/min 15/max pressures. Several week sin, after waking up during the night with heart pounding and clearly not breathing, I put on my fingertip pulse oximieter. Waking up the same way from the next doze cycle, it was flashing "77" at me, not a good sign. The sleep doc put me on an official overnight pulse oximeter study (a week later no results) but I also decided to order a Wellue SleepU to collect my own data. The fact that the finger sensor vibrates when your SpO2 falls below a chosen trigger level is also a positive (providing an intervention measure rather than just observing).
Question: For 6 of the past 7 nights, I find that as soon as I fall asleep, my SpO2 jumps off a cliff, usually triggering the vibration alert, although I don't always wake up all the way for it. Is this a common pattern for people with emergent central apnea?
Here is a closeup of one event (black triangles are the vibration alert) from the O2Insight Pro provided by Wellue:
There are other similar events during the night. Over this week, time below 90% SpO2 has ranged from ~30 sec to 7 minutes, and AHI's were ~7 to 12 (overall mean about 10).
I am quite pleased with the Wellue and have integrated it with my CPAP routine. Quick hint: rather than cart it off to a carger somewhere each day, I keep a little portable USB powerbank with the system. Multiple SleepU recharges later, the bank hasn't even gotten down to 75% charge level yet, so this works great.