Tag: sleep

I am past the pain (mostly) so let’s look back on how I’ve been sleeping. It’s not great. (View it large if needed.)

Red is bad, and means fewer than four hours of sleep. There’s a lot of those. Of course it’s not “fewer than four hours” It’s “fewer than four hours of CPAP time” which would happen every time I would wake up after not even four hours of sleeping, typically in a lot of pain, and move to another room to as not disturb my partner.

There are some good chunks of blue though. I thin the first one (furthest left) is when the increased my medication. There’s also a good section in April, right after I got the injections in my spine. That actually did provide a little relief for about two weeks, but the pain came right back after that.

Overall this is the worst report in at least five years. There were some nights where I did get some sleep after the red < 4 records, but never more than an hour or two. I was often just exhausted, and sometimes I would take a nap later in the day.

I’m going to have to explain all of this to my sleep doctor in a few months.

I guess I waited a year since the last Sleep Report!? Time for an update! The one big change in the last six months has been my use of a High Capacity CPAP Water Tank that I built myself. I no longer run out of water for most of the year. I haven’t really had a chance to use it in winter yet, so we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve had a bit of insomnia the last few weeks as well, which is annoying, because I’ve been sleeping pretty good actually! Hopefully it’s a temporary thing (stress and all that) and I can get back to a solid 6 hours of sleep per night at some point.

It’s been a number of months since the last report and I am definitely doing much better with the new CPAP machine.

The one issue I’ve had with it is that the water tank always runs out before I get enough sleep. Like, even with the humidity set low (3 or 4) it runs out after like 5 or 6 hours… and this is in the summer! Winter will probably be dryer, though we did get a whole house humidifier as part of the new furnace install during the winter, so who knows?

I had this plan to modify my CPAP water chamber to be larger, and it was a good plan! I then searched to see if others had done so and they have, though with different approaches…

So I may still try to modify the tank, but for now I have two tanks, and fill one and place it in the machine, and half fill another so I can swap around 4am or 5am when I wake up dried out because it ran out of water… I’d like to set the humidity high at like 5, 6, or even 7, but alas… I cannot yet.

Anyway, here’s wishing you a good night’s sleep!

I figured it was time to do another sleep report since I’ve had the new CPAP for a while now and it’s been over six months the last report.

First of all, the new CPAP is way better than the old (failing) one the insurance company refused to replace. It’s easier to use, provides better stats, and is a bit smaller as well. All good there.

I’ve averaged 6 hours 32 minutes of use per night for that past two months. I missed one night of use due to being unexpectedly stuck in Chicago overnight on March 9th, and it looks like March 18th was a short usage night but I was also on the road so that might be why. But also, there were two night I got over 8 hours… which is nice, because it’s not a regular thing.

(I also just notices all the times are wrong! I probably missed a setting in OSCAR when I created a new profile for the new machine.

Anyway, I am thankful I finally got a new machine, it seems to work great, and I look forward to better sleep!