I'm back after an interesting few months.
Some quick history. After six years on an old, clunky brick of a CPAP machine, I talked my doctor into getting me a new sleep study that ended up with me getting an Airsense 10. That was a much better machine and, in a lot of ways, it helped me figure a *lot* out about my apnea. I was having tons of OA's, HA's and CA's that my old machine flatly wasn't handling and that I didn't find out about until I started reading my Sleepyhead data from my Airsense 10. Knowing about those, and pushing back against my doctor at the time (who clearly wasn't reading detailed data), I ended up here, at Apnea Board. The fine folks here pretty muched fixed my OA problems by suggesting pillow adjustments and, most important, a cervical collar to keep my chin from dropping and my mouth coming open. :
But I was still having problems with CA's and pressure-related blowouts of my mask seal from the Airsense 10. So I changed doctors and, after a couple sleep studies where they tried BiPAP (which failed) and ASV (which seemed to do better), I ended up with a Dream Station BiPAP/ASV.
The ASV seems to do a much better job of addressing my apnea events while I'm fully asleep. My AHI numbers are fabulous.
One of odd things is what happens when I'm just falling asleep or drowsing in and out of sleep.
I've long been aware that, as I'm drifting off to sleep, my breathing slows, then stops. I just quit breathing. It's one of the reasons I changed docs and went in for new studies: I was concerned about the mechanism that saw me simply quit breathing.
The Dream Station does a pretty good job of pulsing me with a BiPAP hit when that happens. At first, it was difficult because they had the pulse set up to a fairly high pressure and it was waking me up when it fired. Every time I'd start to drift off again, it'd fire, wake me up, and make me breathe.
They adjusted the BiPAP pulse setting so it's better now, but I'm left to question:
Why doesn't the Dream Station track/count the BiPAP pulses it hits me with? None of the data I've seen has any tally of it, even though the Dream Station can hit me 10 or 20 times a night (depending on how long it takes me to fall asleep). It seems to me that, either the Dream Station is being too sensitive at firing off those BiPAP pulses, or I'm having those stop-breathing moments quite a bit before I'm truly into my sleep cycles that the Dream Station is recognizing and addressing for me.
It's nice that the DS is catching all those low breathing/CA moments, but it seems like something that ought to be of interest to the tracking data.
Also, the DS is flagging a *ton* of vibratory snoring that neither I, nor my wife, are hearing. Not sure what that's about, but it's happening a lot.
Any thoughts?