I thought I would add a testimonial to this thread, for the possible benefit of newbies who need some encouragement, even though I have babbled about this elsewhere.
CPAP therapy works great! It can get rid of your constant fatigue! (I'm not being paid to say this.) But seriously, folks, you have to stick with it for some number of consecutive days, maybe weeks, to see the changes happen. After that, it's likely that you will be a convert and you'll be writing your own testimonial. The usual compliance time required by insurance providers (so that you get to keep your machine) is four hours per night and 70% of nights, but let me tell you, that minimum is lame & ineffective and you can do
much better than that if you try.
About CPAP's good effects, an analogy that occurred to me is that the situation is somewhat like having been stuck for some number of months or years in a tedious & stressful office job that you hate, with people you don't enjoy working with, so that you just want to chuck the whole thing, but you're stuck there for all the usual reasons. That's what sleep apnea is sort of like. You have your head down and are oblivious most days, just putting in your time ... but then eventually a miracle occurs and one day you realize that you've just hit official retirement age and you
are suddenly able to chuck the whole thing and say "Good riddance" and relax and take it easy and be free, for a change. That's CPAP therapy. It gives you back the energy you were lacking all that time, and it clears your head and makes you alert again. You don't fall asleep during the day, don't need to take a nap after lunch, and are able to function OK during the usual everyday activities, which wasn't the case before.
My personal back-story is just normal & average, so I'm sure it echos many others out there. My life in late middle age was proceeding at its usual leisurely pace, which was about one day per day, sometimes slightly less. But gradually I noticed some sinister changes in my habits: wanting to sleep later in the morning
but waking up feeling tired, etc. All the usual stuff. I was so oblivious that the possibility of sleep apnea (which I knew next to nothing about anyway!) didn't even occur to me until a routine visit to my GP, who quizzed me about a few symptoms and said "Sleep apnea, most likely" and suggested a referral to a sleep clinic for a study. I shrugged and said "OK", and the rest is history. But of course it took a long time, as these things unfortunately tend to do: months for my appointment to come up, a few weeks between the two parts of the study, many more weeks until the earliest available follow-up appointment to go over the results. Foo!
But then, after the follow-up appointment, I had the prescription. I was assuming that things would move more quickly, but they didn't do that yet through the official channels, which again is sadly typical. So, being both impatient and very temporarily & unusually semi-rich, on my own I bought a relatively inexpensive machine and a mask, and started using them. That was a good move if I do say so myself (and it was made possible by all the excellent information available on this web site), and I recommend that as a useful tactic for a new sleep-apnea patient who can afford it and whose clinic or insurance provider or DME is stonewalling for any reason. It takes the heat off, so that you can then afford to take your time with the DME negotiation and do it right. (ObWikiLinks:
"Dealing with a DME" and
"Machine choices", very useful!)
I can't even remember how many days on CPAP it took for me to notice a big difference, but eventually I did. The "eventually" is mainly because I wasn't able to magically adjust to wearing a mask in one or two nights; my semi-compliance at first was somewhere around four or five hours per night, five nights out of seven. But, helped by a couple of mask changes along the way (that was an important educational experience in my case, as it is in many others!), within a few weeks I got used to it and was doing 8 hours/night, 7 nights/week, which is where I've stayed since.
And I call that success. I have been lucky in not experiencing any major problems: no anxiety, no skin disorder from the masks, thankfully no aerophagia, and so on. So in that regard I'm a little bit privileged, just by chance. However, I think that's also a fairly typical story for a newbie who tells himself or herself "Self, just hang in there, and eventually it'll all work out." Which it did.
Thank you, and good evening. Copies of my autobiography are on sale in the lobby.