I've tried the BIPAP machine and no matter how diligent I was or how hard I persevered, I could not adapt to the machine -- in fact the machine was a living hell, and I slept worse with it than without it. The so-called "gold standard" of Sleep Apnea treatment, to me at least, should be renamed the "substandard" of Sleep Apnea treatment, because, quite frankly, it sucks!
The worst part about my experience with Sleep Apnea has been the constant frustration of trying to explain to the many ENT doctors I have seen over the years that sleep apnea affects the brain and the mood of a person much differently than general insomnia or sleep latency. It seems as though, unless the doctors experience it themselves, they are incapable of being empathetic and so they just try to pass-off another duel diagnosis, such as a mood disorder or something along those lines to explain the lack of treatment success. In my opinion, my condition has been made much more severe by doctors who just seem to be playing the guessing game. I've had three surgeries - all vey painful -- with no success.
It's very easy to determine if a patient's sleep apnea has improved or not after a specific treatment: Just ask the patient how s/he feels and follow their answer up with a few cognitive battery tests and mood tests to get a more objective result, but in my opinion, if the patient feels better, then that's all that matters. I think doctors make it more complicated than it has to be. I mean, I had moderate sleep apnea for 10yrs and after my second surgery, the sleep study showed my AHI was 42 which was 12 points higher than when I was first diagnosed. So, coincidently, the doctors, in my opinion have made my condition worse.
And the only thing that makes the apnea tolerable is by maintaining a lean body mass of about 9%, and that requires a lot of discipline and hard work at the gym. I have completely lost my faith in the sleep medicine community. If you want to get help I guess you really have to help yourself. I remember watching those hall-mark family movies when I was a teenager, where a mother and father had a very sick child and the professional medical community could not find what was wrong or they knew what was wrong but did not have a known cure. So, the parents became doctors themselves and did intense research and eventually discovered a cure, shocking the medical community who had told them that what they did was impossible. Impossible? It seems not.
