Two Weeks on Therapy

I was diagnosed with moderate sleep apnea a year and a half ago. I did a sleep study with a take home monitor and it said I was having 6 events per hour. I decided at that time not to go on a machine because it wasn't that bad and even though I would get a little tired here and there throughout the day it wasn't usually stopping me from doing my activities. A little over a month ago, however, things suddenly got really bad. The moment I would start dozing off my throat would close and I would get jolted back awake from snoring or snorting. It was taking me hours to fall asleep and it would be really late at night by the time I did and I was waking up exhausted. After a week of it I went back to the sleep clinic and got the CPAP machine.

I've been using it for two weeks, but I am still feeling like absolute garbage most of the day. I've had a couple of days where I've felt less fatigued and was actually able to hit the gym, but for the most part my physical activity has completely stopped because I have no energy. I have an AirSense 10 AutoSet machine with an AirFit N20 nose mask. The settings are all auto with the pressure starting at 4 when I turn it on and max setting of 20. I am definitely having less events per hour, which I can tell even without looking at the data. The data on myAir shows it's been as low as 1 event on a few nights, never been more than six. All my scores have been between 80 to 100, yet despite all of this I feel terrible. I am still so tired.

I notice I don't sleep through the whole night. I only seem to sleep for about two or three hours and then I wake up. It takes a me a bit to fall back to sleep and I'll do a couple of more hours and wake up again. Sometimes I have to restart the machine to go back to a pressure of 4 because I can't seem to fall back to sleep as easy when the pressure is higher. I usually check the pressure real quick when I do wake up wondering if there was any common pressure setting that maybe was causing me to wake up after a few hours. I've seen as low as 6 and as high as 13, so there is no common denominator. Last night, for the first time (that I'm conscious of anyway), I actually woke up gasping for air, almost like I had stopped breathing altogether.

I'm trying to stay positive because I know it takes time, but my life totally sucks because of this. I've trained in MMA for several years and I haven't been to the gym in over a month ever since this got really bad. I also would go to Orange Theory a few times a week for exercise and I've only made it there twice since this started. I pretty much lay on my couch all evening once I'm done working because I'm too fatigued to do anything. When I do get up I feel lightheaded and dizzy at times. I have no social life anymore. I've barely seen my friends. I was expecting better results than this and I'm becoming frustrated and depressed now

Perhaps the tiredness during the day isn't all OSA related. Suggest you get with your primary care doc and have a full physical. I am also suspicious that your PAP therapy isn't really optimized; suggest also that you might look into an in-clinic overnight study and then titration study so you can be more sure your PAP therapy is prescribed as well as it can.