CPAP update

[mmcirvin]

I've been sleeping with my CPAP machine for a month now, and, I think, finally getting used to the mask.

Just in the past several days, I'm starting to have regular nights in which I manage to sleep through the whole night without having to get up and remove the mask for a few minutes to give my nose a break. These nights are good: I wake up feeling more rested than I have in a long time. I think I'm just getting used to the mechanical pressure on my nose. It does seem to take several weeks to get to that point.

My apnea event counts have settled into a strange pattern: in a typical night on the machine I only have about 5-6 events/hour, sometimes as low as 3, a level the app/website seems to consider "minimal". But there's still the odd night in which it jumps up to about 14: notably, the whole time we were at the hotel in NH, but it sometimes happens at home too. I think it might just have to do with whether I'm on my back or my side for most of the night. I still feel tolerably rested in the morning after these incidents; I presume the CPAP is powering past them well enough to keep me asleep.

I definitely don't need to switch to a nose-and-mouth face mask. I'm still wondering if should switch to one with "nasal pillows" (nostril-cushions sort of like earbud inserts), but I don't know if it'd fix the problems I have with my skin breaking out around the contact points--it might just change the pattern. Something that seems to help a lot is washing just the nose piece with dish soap much more frequently than they tell you to, every couple of days, to keep it clean and free of accumulating grease, and one advantage of the design I'm using is that it's very easy to clean. (I have a bunch of spare nose pieces, so I don't have to worry too much about destroying it this way.) My nose and upper lip seem to be getting tougher around the contact area, so I should probably give it more time first.

Comments

[jwgh]

One unexpected CPAP-related thing that surprised me is that, before I got the machine, I used to get up pretty frequently throughout the night with an intense need to pee. I assumed that that would still be the case once I used the CPAP -- you gotta go, you gotta go, right? -- but it turns out that once I didn't wake up for other reasons, I didn't have to wake up for that reason, either. I asked the CPAP people about it and they said it wasn't unusual.

Maybe my mind used to convince me that, if I was awake at 3 in the morning, it must be because I had to use the bathroom, or something? If so, it was a very convincing illusion.

[mmcirvin]

Yeah, I rarely used to sleep through the whole night, but it was probably some combination of apnea and GERD waking me up. When I started using the CPAP (and opremazole), that likely switched to the presence of the CPAP mask itself waking me up, but I'm getting past that now.

[ckd]

I use nasal pillows and really like them. (My mask is the Philipa Nuance Pro, which feels very light.)

[rone]

I like the pillows, too, but it did shift the skin problems instead of eliminating them. It did take longer than a month for them to settle down.