Increased Aerophagia "air into stomach" + Short Breath in past week.

[whysleep]

I've been using my CPAP machine for 10+ years.


The RESMED AIR 10 combined with the Dreamwear Nasal and sleeping straight on my back has prevented "swallowing of air" that i get on my side.   

I have no issues breathing through my nose with the CPAP on, but do get blocked (sinus) if I don't have it on and lie down for a period then it clears.

However as of the last week when I 'fall asleep' I stop breathing and wake up. With the CPAP on this becomes a shot of air into my stomach as I stop breathing and it also wakes me up. Finding that I am short of breath during the day - perhaps asthma? So I am having issues sleeping with it, and without it.

Sleep times have decreased from 5-6 hrs down to 3 and last night only 2 broken hours.

I have traveled overseas and am now 1.5 weeks into the trip in a different timezone - but feel like I have acclimatized and haven't had this issue before - do this trip quite often.

I am not overweight and usually walk but haven't the past week - so going to try getting back into that again first to see if the excercise helps with this.

Has anyone else had this issue get worse and has had any kind of treatment to help with the issue?

Cheers.

[Gideon]

Welcome to the forum, we can and will help you.

What I see is that you have a problem. Part of that is aerophagia. The common response for aerophagia is to back off (max) pressure to relieve that and then build back to your therapeutic pressure.

Here at Apnea Board most of us much prefer to provide advice based on data. The data we prefer is the detailed data on your SD card read by OSCAR and displayed in the daily charts. So please download OSCAR and organize the charts per the Organize link in my signature. Let's see if the charts give us a better clue.

[whysleep]

I've started to install OSCAR and grab my data. Thanks for that suggestion.

I approached my problem with a lot of aerobic exercise. I did a 14km hike over 540m (1771') vertical both up and down to work my lungs and tire myself out so I wouldn't concentrate on not falling asleep. Fell asleep within 5 minutes of hitting the pillow.

The primary problem causing my issue was Sinus - a single dosage of Vicks Sinex has rid me of the upper chest heaviness and nasal blockage when I lay down has gone away completely. 

With the combination of exercise, ensuring I was really well hydrated, Sinex and using the humidifier to combat the dryness caused by Sinex use, I got 8.5hrs sleep last night with only 0.3 events per hour (my normal on the CPAP)!!

I hope this helps anyone else who goes through this - it was quite the ordeal.