singingkeys

So here are my results from 10/16. I started it earlier than that, but something must have happened and I restarted it again when I got up for the bathroom at 2:00am. This was for the 3 hour period from 2:00am to 5:30am. Looks like my heart rate started going up and down about halfway through and at one point my SPO2 level went down to 88%. A number of others in the low 90's.

So here are my results from 10/16. I started it earlier than that, but something must have happened and I restarted it again when I got up for the bathroom at 2:00am. This was for the 3 hour period from 2:00am to 5:30am. Looks like my heart rate started going up and down about halfway through and at one point my SPO2 level went down to 88%. A number of others in the low 90's. The heart rate time and SPO2 variations, as I figured, coincide some. Going to try for an 8-hour more thorough check tonight.

So here are my results from 10/16. I started it earlier than that, but something must have happened and I restarted it again when I got up for the bathroom at 2:00am. This was for the 3 hour period from 2:00am to 5:30am. Looks like my heart rate started going up and down about halfway through and at one point my SPO2 level went down to 88%. A number of others in the low 90's.

https://image.ibb.co/jtL9dA/1.jpg https://image.ibb.co/jORhyA/2.jpg https://image.ibb.co/jvtjBV/3.jpg

So here are my results from 10/16. I started it earlier than that, but something must have happened and I restarted it again when I got up for the bathroom at 2:00am. This was for the 3 hour period from 2:00am to 5:30am. Looks like my heart rate started going up and down about halfway through and at one point my SPO2 level went down to 88%. A number of others in the low 90's.

https://image.ibb.co/jtL9dA/1.jpg https://image.ibb.co/jORhyA/2.jpg https://image.ibb.co/jvtjBV/3.jpg

So here was a result from last night. I'm not sure why it starts at 1:59...I went to bed about 12:30am and started it then, then I got up at 5:30am. I think I may have accidentally turned it off and nothing was visible until 2am when I turned it back on after getting up for the bathroom. An hour and a half into sleep, it looks like my heart rate started elevating and going up and down apparently in relation to whatever was going on. At one point, it looks like my SPO2 level dropped to 88%.

I understand you are between health care plans. Is your plan to wait until you have another health care plan in effect before you go ahead with a CPAP?

Not sure yet. The new job is one of those temp-to-hire deals, but the unique thing about the new employer is that they have hired people directly after a month and the time period is solely based on how well you do the job. In that case, I might get instant benefits upon direct hire, depending on the company. It is also a union and I have never worked for one of those (orientation is tomorrow, actually). If it is within a month, I'll basically be into the new year anyway and just wait to throw all of that at my new deductible for next year. On the other hand, once I get hired on directly with the company, money won't be a problem. The issue is getting enough sleep to pull 50 hours a week.

Right now I don't have anything to go on but the crazy amount of times that I seem to wake up and the single sleep study that I've had for only 2.75 hours. A lot of that could have been skewed. I moved around a lot during the study, my breathing may have increased out of frustration from their crazy tall pillows that were extremely uncomfortably and then I was the last one that they put the sensors on. Some of those hypopneas/apneas could have even been related to my neck positioning on those very tall pillows. Someone was snoring massively in the room next to mine and a machine in another room kept letting out a loud beep all throughout the night.

Got my SPO2 monitor today and going to see how many times (if any) my actual oxygen level drops throughout the night for tonight, Friday and Saturday. The monitor takes a measurement every second, so it should catch it. It checks the pulse rate, too...so I can compare the two and see if there are any relations around the same time period.

If my oxygen level can't be found to drop any and I'm having these odd "jumps/jerks" that wake me up whether I'm on my back, side or stomach, then it may not be sleep apnea. A machine would be useless to me if I've got something else going on that just wakes me up. That may or may not be "better" than needing a machine because it would probably mean that I have something else alarming going on. But we'll see. I'm planning to do an SPO2 test Thursday, Friday and Saturday night to see if I can pick up anything.

If I absolutely can't find anything at all, I may end up finding another sleep doctor so that I can have a sleep study at another location. The two people doing the sleep studies at the previous clinic that I went to seemed to be rather unprofessional. I did not care for the facility. It was in a questionable area of the city and they just seemed to have a don't-care attitude and couldn't wait to hurry me out of the door. I think she actually woke me up a bit earlier than the time I was supposed to get up, as well. The whole time that she was putting the electrodes on, she complained to me about her sleep problems, that she was allergic to a couple of pages of things and such.

I suspect that I probably have some form of sleep apnea and may end up on a machine. If I had to guess how many times I woke up over 8 hours last night, it would probably be 100+ times. Still unknown what exactly is waking me up, but I'll know soon enough and I get SPO2 sensor today to start testing myself tonight and comparing readouts on the computer. I have been thinking ahead of time about what I would need, which setup might be best for me, etc.

I'm trying to figure out how much this will cost in general. I know that many people state that the machines can last anywhere from 3-5 years and up to 6-8 years in some cases if you take care of it. What about the other equipment like the hoses, connectors, etc.? Do you have to buy a new mask/nostril pillows/hoses often?

How do you keep the machine "clean" like it should be kept? This seems to vary wildly. I've browsed around the forum for a while and I see where some people say that they "don't worry about" cleaning the hose and just lightly clean the mask and pillows. Others indicate that they use various mild and unscented soaps to flush through the hoses and clean the mask. Yet I have known of a couple of people who were said to have gotten sick because they didn't clean their machine properly. What's the deal with that? How do you "clean" the inside of the machine and what are they referring to, stuff like mold on the lungs or something?

If I end up having to get one, I would want a smaller machine. If I need to travel sometimes, I would want to take it with me, of course. I would want to get a computer readout on how I'm breathing and such. I'm sure that both of those is probably a common thing nowadays. Do they make smaller hoses the size of an oxygen line (diameter of pen/sharpie) instead of those huge hoses that I see with the diameter of a quarter? They look ridiculously big.

Finally...how did you figure out if you needed a mask or the nasal pillows? The mask seems like it would make people a bit claustrophobic and also cause indentations on the face and mess up the hair on the back/top of the head. The nasal pillows, on the other hand...do those stretch the nostrils to make them permanently large? One can't help but wonder that.

I had a good $8,000 in payments for medical bills for this year and ran about $45,000 total through my previous employer's insurance chasing down a fix for the sleep troubles. I haven't started my new job yet, but it will likely be next Monday. 12-hour shifts, 48-50 hours per week and I'll likely be working 4 days each week. That will, no doubt, be tiring for someone with sleep issues and I'm trying to hurry and get all of this sleep stuff together so that within coming weeks I can have a solution for it. I won't have health insurance yet and the end of the year is a little over a month away. Should I wait to get another sleep study and/or CPAP machine? Are they that expensive?

As a little update, after 4-5 hours or so of sleep this morning, I woke up laying on my stomach. I had awaken twice within about a minute. I woke up with the typical "feels like my body is moving around lightly" feeling that a lot of people tend to normally feel after being in deep sleep. However, in addition to that, I felt two distinct and separate little "jumps" that seemed to have awaken me each time, maybe 15-20 seconds apart. Not a hard jerk awake like the "just dreamed that I was falling" thing. It was more light/subtle and barely there, but yet somehow still a full-body jerk enough to wake me up. It felt more neurological and that was all while on my stomach, which is usually said to not be OSA-related since it supposedly mostly happens when laying on the back. It almost felt like the little single full-body "jumps" that I get sometimes throughout the day while awake. They tend to be hours apart and a little worse the more tired I am. I felt a little tingly all over right after waking up, as well. Each time that I woke up, I was breathing and somehow remembered to mentally note that instantly as soon as I woke up. So I'm not sure that I stopped breathing and woke up because of that, but if nothing else, I did jump awake in an odd way. I had a little bit of a headache after waking up and felt kind of tingly all over.

To start off, I have ordered a wrist oximeter with a finger sleeve to test myself throughout the night and verify that in fact my oxygen levels are not dropping. If they for sure aren't, I must be having some other kind of odd issue. The only thing that is for sure true is that I feel like a truck ran over me in the morning and have zero energy. That info will be useful when I have another sleep study.

Yeah, the last study was in the sleep lab and supposedly checked for everything. They claimed that I didn't have restless leg syndrome. They did put electrodes on my legs, head and all over my body, put a microphone in front of my mouth, some kind of device that measured breathing through my nostrils, etc.. So I walked away with "severely fragmented sleep" and yet the sleep doctor said, "Well, your oxygen levels didn't drop, so that's good!"

Then he indicated that I "didn't have sleep apnea" because I was 0.3 away from the 5.0 AHI required. Yet he said, "If you want, we can try CPAP!" Well, why would I want to try a CPAP if I supposedly don't have it? What's waking me up?

What I don't understand at all from the sleep study that I had before is how I had 13 hypopneas and 50 "breathing events" in 2.75 hours and yet they said that my oxygen level didn't drop. If hypopneas are by definition slow/no breathing, my oxygen levels should have dropped, even if just for a short time. They didn't seem to know what the 50 "breathing events" were in detail.

I would be fine with the lab titration study, but why can't they find anything during the actual study itself? :-/ If I have OSA or Central, they should be able to determine that.