Hi, Chris. I had a good low-AHI night and I don't have to be anywhere else this morning, so I'll babble for a few pars (you're welcome).
As DB said, a sleep study is a very good thing to go for if you have insurance and if you're not certain of the diagnosis or severity of your condition. That'll tell you what's what and, if you are afflicted, it'll give you a prescription for machine and mask, which opens a lot of doors. The Rx is valid long-term and is not limited to any vendor; you can use it to buy equipment on your own over the next few years, without the involvement of insurance provider and Durable Medical Equipment (DME) supplier. But if you do have insurance and if it will greatly reduce your out-of-pocket expenses (low deductible), then by all means use that and go for the DME trip. The cost savings can make it worth putting up with a lot of hassle.
Also as DB said, the specific model of S9 is all-important, and don't forget to update your profile/sidebar with that. If it turns out that you need a different machine to get the full data and APAP, and if you can afford to buy it yourself, that's easy
if you have the Rx because (for instance)
Supplier #2 (there's also a link to that list at the top of the page) sells used machines at reasonable prices. Generally, from any manufacturer, a machine that includes the word "Auto" in its model name will be the one you want. Without the Rx, you might need to buy on Amazon or from a private seller on craigslist or ebay or whatever, but another approach is to explore all of the suppliers in the list here to find out which ones don't ask for a copy of the Rx when you order or immediately afterward.
The choice of mask is all-important for comfort and for continuing to use the machine consistently over the first few months. An uncomfortable or leaky mask can put you off the whole thing, so you will need to persevere. Mask preference is mostly subjective and the differences among the various makes & models can be huge
but will often vary from one person to another. It's important not to assume that any mask will work OK or even that the second one you try will be the one to stay with indefinitely. It might take one or two more than that, but the reviews in the "Mask Reviews" forum should help quite a bit. For starters, if you haven't already done so, you can read the "Mask Primer" here:
http://www.apneaboard.com/wiki/index.php...ask_Primer
Obviously you have been reading in the discussions and wiki here, but unfortunately that's a never-ending chore and I recommend continuing it for a while whenever you have some time to spare. There doesn't seem to be a set of the traditional FAQs as such (to build that would be a huge task and would take half of forever, I think; the discussions with the raw material here go back years), so the information that you need for getting started is scattered through many, many board posts and some wiki articles. Maybe it'd be best to start with the wiki, scan the subjects there and read what's relevant, and then try some searches of the board in general using whatever keywords are most important for you at the moment. One minor gotcha is that the search feature here won't accept terms shorter than four characters, but you can always use an external search engine: for instance, with Google you would include the term
site:apneaboard.com to limit the search to this domain.
If you ever get bogged down with the mask-and-machine experience (which can be stressful or annoying at first) and are tempted to give it all up as not worth the trouble, just do some reading in the thread
"Your Personal CPAP Success Story", maybe starting at the end (most recent) and working backward page by page. This stuff does work extremely well for most patients, and the results over just a few weeks of consistent use (100% compliance: 8 hours every night or whatever) can be amazing.
Cheers ...