Hope and sharing a possible solution to sleeping on your back

[surferdude2]

kfujioka, Sleeping on ones back will require most CPAP users to need a much higher therapy pressure as opposed to sleeping on their side. The increased pressure can cause some people, especially new users, to discontinue using CPAP due to the discomfort of exhaling under higher pressures. The higher pressures can also cause some users to have mask leaks that are harder to control without causing discomfort. Extreme leakage can make the therapy less effective and even make the derived data less reliable.

[racprops]

Hi. I was just wondering: why does it matter sleeping on your back if you use the CPAP ?
I sleep on my back every night and unfortunately wake up,due to shoulder pain. I am trying to sleep on my stomache to relieve my shoulder pain but my neck gets too sore to sleep with it turned sideways all night. ( My tiny nasal mask works fine sleeping on my stomache if I am near to the side of the bed.)

Everyone is different, in my case even with mainly Clear Air apneas and hypopneas, I get really bad if I get on my back and if I get bad the next day I am a Zombie and cannot work.

I have do enough testing to know this works for me, I post this so it might help others.

For the past two weeks my AHIs have been mostly ZEROs and I feel better, 80% of the time...

Rich

[racprops]

OK I have fixed my sleeping to the point that I can get ZERO AHIs and sleep for 3 to 4 hours at least one sleep season per night, so I am now seemly getting the deep rest sleep I seemly need. And my days are getting better.

And thanks to my body rising folded blanket I can do these sleep seasons on my side and so far NOT wake up in major pain in my hip or shoulder.

So now the only things that seem off are my breathing rate and why is the machine raising the pressure a lot??

I am having NO apneas..ZERO, ZIP, NOTHING..so what is the machine reacting to???

And why is my breathing rate running so fast…my oximeter has not shown any major drop in my O2 …yet my breathing rate seems high and can drop down from time to time…

Are these things a problem??


Here is my Sleepyhead readout:

[PaulaO2]

I have to sleep on my back due to pain issues. I've been experimenting with the best incline where I am getting the best positing for my body yet also not increasing my AHI. Currently I am using a bunch of pillows but, as racrops has discovered in his efforts, they shift during the night. I wind up in some awkward positions and in a lot of pain several times a night.

So now I am about to try wedges. We know the approximate height and angle at least. Wedge pillows can be expensive! We're just going to get blocks of foam and cut it down to fit me.

Racrops, have you looked into those U shaped body pillows? I wonder if one of those, kinda tied together so it maintains it's U shape, would work for you?

[racprops]

I hope it works out for you...when I first started my sleep treatment I was still recovering for my quad bypass and was still unable to sleep in a bed and was still sleeping in my Lasyboy recliner...and for a while thought I needed to sleep in it for ever...most of the time I had high AHIs BUT every once in a while I got a low or zero reading...but I almost could not figure out how or why.

My recliner is a manual model and I was able to end up in many positions...up down, flat or sitting straight up...it was driving me nuts...

At last it seemed the best was more or less flat but twisted on my side...(not easy to do in a recliner)

So I tried returning to a bed, and tried a stack of pillows and even a wedge pillow to try to sleep in a elevated position..only the get major back pain and even my backside hurt...and high AHIs.

At last I tried sleeping in my old most often sleep position, on my left side..and my AHIs started to go down..a lot.

But I still was not getting a GOOD nights sleep,,and it took some time and a night vision camera to see I would not stay on my side and when I got on my back I got a lot of AHIs..

And it took a while to get to this point I am at now.

Rich

[Ghost1958]

As far as my wife or I not going to our back at some point for a while at night its not going to happen. We just do. I dont see us wearing back packs etc to bed to keep from it.

I have thought about putting some bricks under the head of the beds legs to raise it a bit. But the machines seem to rise to the occasion so to speak and get things under control pretty quick if we do so not to worried about it. Thats was a bit more disruptive to me as my max pressure has to be up around 18 to get the job done where 12 max will clear her out.

But ive gotten used to and found a mask that will handle the higher pressure so its not an issue now. When I get my Eson should be less pressure needed as an old nasal I was given always keeps me 1.5 and under with way less pressure

[racprops]

Some more good news, I ONLY had two days in all of December that I had a AHI reading (the rating for sleep apneas) that came in over 1.00!!

The rest of the month I have readings of ZERO or at worst a low reading that was under 1.00.

[trish6hundred]

Some more good news, I ONLY had two days in all of December that I had a AHI reading (the rating for sleep apneas) that came in over 1.00!!

The rest of the month I have readings of ZERO or at worst a low reading that was under 1.00.

Hi racprops,
That is good news; keep up the good work.

[racprops]

I did a count and out of 31 Days of December I only had 12 days with ANY AHI counts, that is 19 days with ZERO AHI COUNTS... and only two of those 12 days with AHI counts higher than 1.00 the rest 10 days were of counts UNDER 1.00!!

I made one improvement I now use a feather pillow in place of the folded blanket, I found I needed something of an adjustable height during the night as the blanket could be pushed down into the memory form of the bed and thus stop giving me the lift of my torso I need to lower or even keep away hip and shoulder pain, with this pillow I can reshape it to raise the center section as needed.

I have been only waking up once per night with this system.

Rich

[vsheline]

I did a count and out of 31 Days of December I only had 12 days with ANY AHI counts, that is 19 days with ZERO AHI COUNTS... and only two of those 12 days with AHI counts higher than 1.00 the rest 10 days were of counts UNDER 1.00!!

I made one improvement I now use a feather pillow in place of the folded blanket, I found I needed something of an adjustable height during the night as the blanket could be pushed down into the memory form of the bed and thus stop giving me the lift of my torso I need to lower or even keep away hip and shoulder pain, with this pillow I can reshape it to raise the center section as needed.

I have been only waking up once per night with this system.

Hi Rich, that's really great! Thanks for sharing your technique.