My experience with CPAP therapy
When I saw ENT Dr Larry Kalish at the beginning of 2020 he said I had a deviated septum and enlarged turbinates, recommending a septoplasty and turbinate reduction. I declined because I was considering Vivos and had heard many users report improved nasal breathing which I thought may make surgery unnecessary.
(more…)
Emma Cooksey has been doing an amazing job raising awareness of all things related to sleep apnea on her Sleep Apnea Stories podcast. I highly recommend it if you haven’t already checked it out. This week I’m her guest talking about my journey from the hell of chronic fatigue into the wasteland of obstructive sleep apnea.
(more…)
I’ve been wearing my Vivos mRNA Appliance for eight months now. The CPAP pressure trend continued to decline very gradually this month, suggesting that expansion is slowly improving my airway. I feel less sleepy during the day, particularly in the afternoons, but this is still probably mostly due to adapting to CPAP therapy at this point.
(more…)
Time for another monthly update. As usual, my compliance is excellent thanks to my appliance usage tracking spreadsheet. My provider says I’m “super-compliant”, and here’s the graph to prove it: (more…)
It’s been just over 2 months since I started wearing my Vivos mRNA Appliance, so here is an update. I have expanded the upper appliance a total of 2.25mm. Subjectively I’d say I am sleeping better as I’ve had pretty vivid dreams this week, which is good because our body does most of the repair work during REM sleep. I feel a little more alert during the day, but I still need afternoon rests. Perhaps my nasal breathing is improved but I could be fooling myself on that.
My average use of the appliance so far is very close to 16 hours/day, composed of roughly hourly cycles during daytime, and leaving the device installed in the evening and over night. I track my usage in a spreadsheet which helps tremendously with my compliance and generates pretty graphs showing my daily usage so far, like this: (more…)
I’ve just passed the one month point of wearing my Vivos mRNA Appliance®, so here is an update.
Overall, everything is going reasonably smoothly and the data from my CPAP machine is encouraging. I haven’t noticed any major changes in my daytime symptoms yet, but it’s still early days of a treatment that I anticipate will take 2 years.
I’ve just passed seven months using CPAP, so here’s an update. It took a while for my nose to stop hurting when I first started using it, and fortunately Chris Kelly from AER Healthcare recommended I try paw paw ointment, which turned out to be a lifesaver. As a result, my compliance over the period has been over 98%. Here’s my AHI overview during that time as reported by OSCAR:
My AHI results using CPAP for 7 months
I had another appointment with my sleep specialist this week, so I wrote him a one-page summary of all the conventional treatments I’ve been exploring in the hope of curing my obstructive sleep apnea.
Here are the main points: (more…)
I first came across Dan Neuffer, the author of the ANS Rewire Program, in 2012 after watching some of the videos on his CFS Unravelled YouTube channel. At the time, I had been desperately ill for almost 5 years and wasn’t getting any helpful response from my doctors. They just didn’t seem to know what was wrong with me. I checked out Dan’s CFS Unravelled website, read his free e-Book Discover Hope, and sent him an email to thank him for putting the information out there.
It’s exactly ten years to the day since I started this blog. Oh my god, that’s a fucking long time to feel like shit every minute of every day. I’m so angry about the whole thing, there aren’t even words to describe it.
Fortunately, there is some hope on the horizon for me, so I channel that anger into action that will hopefully restore my health. It’s also just over 12 months since I was diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which I now suspect is the cause of my malaise. It turns out that getting a really good nights sleep is incredibly important for your long-term health. The symptoms of CFS and sleep apnea are both like an extreme version of what athletes experience when they overtrain, the common link being that the body isn’t getting sufficient chance to repair itself. (more…)