December Semi-Daily: CPAP

[resonant]

runpunkrun, I'd be interested to hear about your experience with the CPAP machine.

I've only had it for a couple of weeks, but I'm definitely a fan. I haven't taken a nap since the day I brought it home.

I hear a lot of stories about people having difficulty getting used to it, people being issued one and then never using it, etc., but I have had zero problems. It may be because I had spent a year using a dental appliance (a mouthpiece that pulled my lower jaw forward, which was better than nothing but not this good) -- so I had already gone through the process of "there's a thing on my face, and when I change positions I have to rearrange the thing."

It's quiet. It's highly automated. It has a humidifier so the air isn't dry. You'd think it would be really noticeable and distracting to be hooked up to a hose, but I don't notice the hose. (The spouse keeps his house very cold, so when I sleep there, I pull the hose under the covers with me so the air will be a bit warmer when it reaches my face.)



I have a full-face mask, which covers both nose and mouth. I don't get a claustrophobic feeling about it, but sometimes, depending on how I tighten the straps, I feel it pressing on either side of my nose and I start to feel like my nose is stopped up. (I have allergies. My nose is pretty much always stopped up.)

It really doesn't feel like a thing blowing air up my nostrils -- it just feels like there's plenty of air when I need it. Apparently it's programmed to be able to tell when I go to sleep (creepy) and increase the air pressure then. I can't really tell except that sometimes if I wake up to turn over, it's a little noisier than I remember it being.

Problems I've had so far:

- I sleep on my side, and the pillow moves the mask, and sometimes this makes it leak air. I'm not sure if air leakage is a problem as far as the function of the machine, but it's noisy, and sometimes it blows in my eye.

- The mask is kind of rough on the skin. The first two nights, it actually made a blister on my cheek, which I'm now putting a bandaid on before I go to bed, and it leaves me feeling kind of chapped for about an inch out from either side of my nose. Straight-up Vaseline works OK for this, but Neutrogena Hand Cream works better and isn't so greasy.

- It reports statistics back to my doctor, which is a little creepy, but the insurance won't pay for it if it's not being used, which is fair. I have an app so I can see the stats too, and see how much and how well I sleep.

- Speaking of insurance, the sleep doctor's office checked it out thoroughly, but there are so many disclaimers that I'm still not fully confident about how much insurance will pay; the bills haven't started coming in yet. American healthcare sucks, news at 11.

- The mask shifts position when I turn over. Sometimes this wakes me up.

- Turns out that if you spend all night actually lying in bed, rather than waking up every couple of hours and having to get up to pee, you wake up super-stiff in the morning.

My sleep was very, very bad, much worse than I had been aware, and I was losing hours of each day in falling asleep. I had nodded off at my desk at work more than once. I had elaborate multi-step methods to stop me from falling asleep while driving. So it's great to be alert and to get some of my time back.

I'm told that sometimes people's high blood pressure goes down or their memory improves or many other benefits, but it's too soon to tell.

There's a very useful message board at CPAPTalk, but I'm happy to answer questions, too.





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