In which I slept again!

Tried the nasal pillow, and … man, that just did not work at all for some reason. I’d had the thing on when we were struggling to make the machine work, but I hadn’t laid down wearing one yet, proper fit or not, and the panic was immediate and uncontrollable. For the record, this is what the thing looks like:

So it’s not as ridiculous as the thing I posted a couple of days ago, where the hose was attached to the top of your head, and in a lot of ways looks more comfortable and more maneuverable than the full face mask, but that thing is constantly blowing a high volume of air into both of your nostrils, and to exhale through your nose you have to overcome the force of the air that’s coming in. I suspect it’s something I can get used to given time, so I’m going to continue trying, but last night apparently was not the time or the place. So I went back to the full face mask, and while I still haven’t quite gotten over the shame aspect of the whole thing (I have issues with people being able to see me when I’m asleep in the first place, and when I know I look stupid, it’s magnified in a way that’s hard to describe) I did once again have a good night’s sleep, and again– despite an experimental large glass of water the hour before going to bed– made it through the night without having to get up to pee. Doing it on any night pre-CPAP was highly unusual. Two in a row has probably not happened in years.

This suggests, by the way, that I was not, in fact, waking up because I had to pee. I was waking up and it happened that I had to pee, but the necessity was not the cause of the waking up. That was, one assumes, the not breathing.

Also, the 7:00 AM roll-over-and-the-machine-starts-popping thing happened again, and it was nearly out of water again, so I’m not sure if I’m blaming the hose or the water reservoir or what, but I turned down the humidity a little bit. I get up around 6 during the week, so it might not happen anyway. We’ll see what happens. That said, if they ever call me and ask me how to improve their machine, “increase the size of the damn water reservoir” seems to be an easy win, as the humidification levels go from 1 through 10 and a 3 didn’t make it through the night. I think they could probably double the size of the damn thing easily. We’ll see if a 2 dries me out.

The stats my CPAP feeds me through my phone also looked better; I don’t know precisely what an “event” is, and I need to find out, but I assume they’re bad, as we want them below five an hour (pre-CPAP, I was at around eighty, I believe) and they were down 20% from Friday night’s recording. So we’ll see what happens on night three tonight.