[Treatment] Making my own settings

[Lady Knitsalot]

Thank you! I will put all those in and see how it goes tonight.

[Lady Knitsalot]

No, I'm not in Colorado, but maybe some other entity on these charts is? I'm at very low elevation, less than 100 feet. I did stay with my sister for ten days this summer at about 7500 feet, and it took a few days to get acclimated. I slept all right, though she's in a different time zone and I was in a strange room with an air mattress and a cat coming and going during the night. Perhaps I should look at those readings.

I'm going to increase my starting pressure to 8, turn off ramp, and reduce EPR to 2. Not too many changes at once, I hope.

[SarcasticDave94]

Sorry, my lack of coffee attributed Colorado to you while looking at Deb's post.

The edits will be evident pretty quick whether they're helping or not. The best one can do on AutoSet is to avoid some CA. It will not treat them, hence the suggested edits.

[Lady Knitsalot]

Much better sleep, no headache this morning, and a much lower AHI than yesterday. This is even with a stuffy nose from hay fever.
   
I think I see a bout of positional apnea early in the night. I was definitely tucking in my chin, so I'll look into getting a soft collar.

[SarcasticDave94]

Still not bad with that small cluster. Looks like good progress there.

[Deborah K.]

I used to use a cervical collar, and when I did I tried a bunch but liked the Caldera Releaf Collar the best.  It was more comfortable and worked as well as any of the others.  As you are female too I think it would be tall enough, but measure first.

[Lady Knitsalot]

I ordered a medium size collar from Releaf. I'm a short girl with a long neck!

One thing I wonder about is whether congenital anatomy contributes to apnea risk. I have a tiny jaw and narrow nose, and probably my airways are pretty small as well. I'm not obese, though I'm over 60 and of course all the tissues start going slack at some point. My husband says I've been a snorer for many years (though he used to snore 10x as loud before he got his machine.) My sleep has been bad for a long time - it was only in the last few years that it started getting terrible. I thought it was mostly anxiety, until my first try on a CPAP went so well.

I've got to say, I am very lucky that random secondhand machine we were given was already set to APAP, and to pressures pretty close to correct for me. If my first try had been with that CPAP set to 8, like what they sent me home with last week, I probably would have ripped it off my face in five minutes or less, and said something like, "See, I told you it wouldn't work for me."

Not surprisingly, I got no message back from the sleep clinic today. I guess they don't care about the fine-tuning, if the numbers show I'm using the machine. I'd love to be proven wrong about that.

[Lady Knitsalot]

My collar came FAST! Ordered from the website (not Amazon) on Tuesday, it arrived Thursday. So I was able to wear it last night. Here is the report. Wow. Literally the first time I have gone under 1.0 AHI.
   
I'm missing the graphs from Wednesday night, as I accidentally left the SD card in my laptop, but the AHI was 3.1 (possibly affected by hay fever).

[SarcasticDave94]

This looks very good. Congrats. Sleeping more comfortable with more rest? With those numbers, that's your target now.

[Lady Knitsalot]

Yes, I am feeling pretty good. The collar felt constricting at first, but once I got everything arranged and lay down with my new flat pillow, etc., I felt myself rapidly slipping down into sleep. It was a distinctly different sensation from just using my CPAP.

I think I often had trouble falling asleep for many years simply because I was disturbed by minor apnea events as I drifted off, and got constantly nudged to a more awake state. Then I'd have a major event in the middle of the night and get knocked all the way awake, then have trouble getting back down again. It's the quiet and dark at 3 AM which brings out all the circling thoughts to keep you awake for hours. 

This wakefulness in the wee hours used to happen to me at least four nights a week before I got my secondhand CPAP. Now it's almost nonexistent. It did happen the other night when I was trying to sleep with my new machine set at CPAP 8, rather than APAP 8 -13 as I have it adjusted now.

(Though they say people in the pre-modern era often slept in two phases, not continuously all night. Humans apparently are not really built to do a solid 8 hours without interruption, and it's a modern cultural expectation rather than a hard-wired biological imperative.)

So I and other people like doctors were blaming my sleep troubles on an anxiety issue, not on anything physical. Obviously this should have been investigated more thoroughly. But given that I was in perimenopause when this started, and with plenty to be anxious about, it was easiest to try prescribing me various mood-altering pills which didn't have much effect. The "typical" definition of someone who needs CPAP doesn't look much like me.