[Natsu]

From what I've found, being overweight negatively affects sleep. As far as I can tell, the extra weight simply makes it hard to breathe at night, leading to apnea. This can then cause depression and anxiety, depression because you wake up tired and feeling awful every single day and anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep.

At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.

[schwartzworld]

Easy to get, hard to get used to for many. It’s common for doctors to offer little to no support after prescribing the machine.

[Natsu]

There are discords where users offer each other advice. That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them and if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.

[schwartzworld]

> That said, many of the tuning parameters require the doctor to set them

No, they don't. At least not on a Resmed machine. You just have to enter a special mode to change them. On my machine that's holding down 2 buttons for a couple of seconds.

> if you make an appointment you can talk over the problems and get them to adjust the pressure or whatever.

I'm glad you had a Dr that did this for you. It is not the universal experience, and it definitely wasn't mine.

[Natsu]

Which two buttons?

[anktor]

How would support look like in this situation? Honest question I simply don't know

[schwartzworld]

In my case:

Showing me how to use the machine

Showing me how to wear the mask

Configuring the machine with anything other than the default settings

A new machine with the default settings is a nightmare. The apap algorithm will spike your pressure up to 16 (which is too high for most people) one minute and drop down to 4 (which is too low for most) the next. At the high end is aerophagia and leaks, at the low end, your apnea events will still happen.

When I called my doctor and explained the machine made my sleep worse, her office said “we gave you a machine. It’s out of our hands. Would you like us to refer you to a psychologist? The problem must be in your head.” This is almost verbatim.

The equipment supplier wasn’t much better. They offered to do a “mask fitting” but it was mid 2021 and the woman didn’t even want to be in the same room as me for fear of covid.

So what should they have done? I dunno. Eventually a friend recommended a mask that worked for me. I learned to analyze the data reported by the machine and changed the settings myself to something that worked for me. It took a year, the worst year of my life. Tired and constantly waking up. Thank god for YouTube and OSCAR. knowing what I know now, I can (and have) help someone else do this process in a week or two, but I had nobody to even ask.

[Natsu]

That's a bad doctor, IMHO. Ours at least could be talked to and would adjust the pressure, etc.

[koolba]

At the extreme end of concierge medicine I could see the doctor getting into bed with you.

[ZeroTalent]

Date the doctor? :D

[ethersteeds]

I think it would be a good case for handing off from the prescribing doctor to some kind of home health aid / respiratory therapist who can make house calls and help make adjustments at the home.

[vkou]

It needs extensive calibration, if you don't want it to either be ineffective, or wake up in the morning, with your stomach pumped full of air, like a balloon.

The latter is quite painful.

[Natsu]

Not to mention finding out which masks suit you the best.

[Aardwolf]

> At least it's easy to get a home sleep apnea test and an APAP/CPAP these days.

If one wants to rule out sleep apean (being not the best sleeper) but probably doesn't have it (but other causes like stress) but at least want to measure it somewhat, how could one test that oneself with at least some probability?

Lots of things that are called "at home test" seem to involve getting special equipment and sending stuff to a lab anyway, that still involves a physician, some visitations with them etc... anyway.

Is there anything at all that one can do on their own to have at least some idea of the chances of having sleep apnea or not that does not involve a professional? Even if to then consider a professional if there are some indications? E.g. from an all-night audio recording, any indication of sounds that are yes or not sleep apnea indicating? And heartbeat/oxygen etc... measured by a watch?

Or is sleep apnea such a subtle and hard-to-detect issue that it's really impossible to self diagnose, it's such a subtle thing that only specialized equipment and specialists can do it, and trying to measure anything yourself gives no more answer than a 50/50 random chance coin toss?

[Natsu]

The tester they give is basically just a pulse oximeter that logs your heart rate and SpO2 all night. I'm not sure how they interpret it, but I'd imagine that if your heart rate goes crazy and your oxygen drops, that's probably bad.

Otherwise you can look at questionnaires that ask things like whether you wake up a lot at night or snore, etc.

That said... it's pretty easy to just get a device that they give you that you connect to your phone to log data for a night. And they know what they're doing when they interpret it. So I would recommend that, since it's really easy to just go to a place and get a device and do a test.

This isn't like it used to be where you'd have to sleep in some strange place.

[jmalicki]

The at home tests require a quick before and after video call to a physician, and equipment mailed to you and mailed back... It's really not a big deal.

[gosub100]

> anxiety because you may wake up with night terrors after suffocating in your sleep.

I have SA and a history of "mild" nightmares going back decades. Nothing terrifying, but very uncomfortable such as snakes hiding everywhere, and recently other animals such as tigers. I can't prove it, but I believe these are subconscious efforts by your brain to scare you into breathing.

[Natsu]

I mean, panic attacks where you hyperventilate are basically the drowning reflex going off. So given that a lot of the dreams in our case were literally suffocating (drowning, etc.), I'm pretty sure that some part of the brain gets awakened enough to realize something, if not exactly what.