Oops

I went to bed at a few minutes after 11:00pm last night, and at some point a few hours later I screwed up.

I felt like I was having a hard time getting to sleep, but the SleepWatch app says I was under by 11:15.  I’m having more and more doubts about the usefulness of this app.  More on that a little later.

I woke up about an hour later needing to fix the mask again, as usual.  I stopped the machine, took off the mask, put the mask back on, and restarted the machine.  All was well.  I fell back to sleep almost immediately.  I did all right for a while, but at some point, and I’m not sure when (the SleepWatch app makes it look like 3:00am, but the MyAir app looks like 2:00am), I had to fix the mask again.  This time I shut off the machine, took off the mask, and then it was 4:30am.  Umm… ooops.  I woke up with the mask on the bed next to me.  I don’t know if I slept for an hour and a half or for two and a half hours.  Let’s just average it to two hours.  That’s no good.  I put the mask back on and restarted the machine again and slept like a log until my alarm woke me at 6:00.

I figured something like this would happen eventually, and it’s likely to become a semi regular thing as I get more and more used to sleeping with a big plastic alien thing sucking on my face.  I’m going to get to a point where the mask waking me up is not going to be an event of Earth shattering importance and I’m going to start falling asleep right away.  I just have to try and be more careful.  It’s also likely that if I do fall asleep without putting the mask back on, my wife will wake up and yell at me (hi sweetie!) because I’ll be snoring like a nuclear blast powered chainsaw.

The thing that bugs me a little is how the SleepWatch app read things during that mask-free sleep.  The numbers looked almost identical to the night before.  Lots of deep sleep with short little bursts of light sleep mixed in.  In other words, no sign of apnea.  I expected to clearly see the time frame when the CPAP machine was off.  I thought it would show a combination of disrupted sleep and light sleep and that was all.  Nope.  It looked like every other night so far.  That was a little disappointing.

Note to self:  Don’t fall asleep without putting the mask back on.

Noted.

Addendum: I should note that I do feel much more tired today that I have over the last few days (the one night with less than four hours of sleep being the exception).  Is that proof that the CPAP machine is helping me, or is it just a coincidence.  You decide.