New APAP/Forum user looking for some insight!

[Austin7756]

                Hello everyone, I am glad to find this forum page to get some help, so I want to start off with a big thank you!
I had a sleep study done a few weeks ago because over the last 8 years or so I wake up completely exhausted. Unfortunately I never did a sleep study earlier but that's besides the point because we are here now. Anyways, I will try to not make this a long winded post and include what I think is relative information (feel free to inquire about anything if I missed something as I am new).

Some of my stats/RX from my take home sleepy study are:
Diagnosis: Mild OSA
Suggested RX: Empiric APAP therapy on 5 to 20cm h2o with: EPR 3 or equivalent Ramp: Auto
Mask: DreamWisp Nasal Mask
Sp02 Nadir: 86%
Oxygen Desaturation events: 2.9
saturation < 90%: .1 minutes
saturation < 88%: .1 minutes
saturation < 80%: 0 minutes
saturation < 70%: 0 minutes
TST: 6 hrs. 37 min.
% of REM sleep: 22.4%
pRDI 11.6 (REM:21.2, NREM 9.3)
pAHI 3 (REM: 6.5, NREM 2.2)
Supine RDI 9.6
Supine pAHI 2.4
Supine time 3 hrs. 22 min.

I was doing some reading around and it seems to me like I have UARS and my doctor said that calling it UARS is basically semantics and its the same as OSA. I started using my APAP machine and had difficulty sleeping because I am just getting used to it. I had it on auto ramp the first night and starting at the pressure 4cm I was basically fighting for air. I eventually fell asleep and awoke needing to take the tape off my mouth because I felt like I was suffocating. After doing some more research I decided to up my minimum pressure to 7 and turn off auto-ramp. This helped a bit and I got some better sleep. I am curious because even with my low numbers (AHI and RDI) I still have terrible brain fog, low energy, etc, and relatively speaking people with much worse AHI than I are trying to get to my numbers so I think. So I'm wondering too if my numbers are 'desirable' am I even going to see improvement in my symptoms? Because to me it seems like I am in the treated range even though I still feel terrible. Also, if there are any recommendations or things to try let me know please and if you need more of the data from OSCAR let me know! I'm having trouble trying to get more than the two graphs into the screenshot so unfortunately there's only a couple of them in the screenshots. I have a recruit firefighter exam coming up in 6 days and was hoping to improve my quality of sleep so I don't go into the test with some terrible brain fog. Thank you guys I appreciate it!

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[staceyburke]

You said 4 did not seem enough oxygen. I have to have at least a min of 9 to get enough air. If I don’t I have the exact same type of feelings you have discribed.

I would suggest you raise the min until you do not have those problems.

[Austin7756]

Yeah I may increase minimum pressure to 8 tonight and see how that works. I’ve gotta loosen the straps some too because I think it being so tight on my face is waking me up as well. I appreciate the feedback I’ll give it a shot!