Day 58 - Two more perfect days

Friday and Saturday (days 56 and 57) both met the Perfect Day criteria. Today unfortunately I crashed again. I fell asleep for an hour watching a movie at 1am and took my 4:30am nap at 3:30am, but wound up sleeping until 5:30am.

I feel recovered from the night already, which is an improvement. Usually it takes 3 or 4 naps to recover from a bad night, it's only taken 2 today. I think I'm on my way to that perfect polyphasic week FINALLY.

Naps have been much more consistent since I started using the mouth guard/CPAP/chin strap combo. From the video evidence it looks like I'm adapting nicely to breathing through my nose. Rather than struggling to breathe through my mouth every few minutes, I'm breathing through my nose and my breathing is very regular. I also don't wake up feeling like I'm suffocating anymore (not a pleasant experience).

There are still occasional bad naps (usually where I roll on my back and manage to open my mouth) and they're still hell, but the frequency is decreasing. I think I had one bad nap during my two Perfect Days.

At this rate things will be great by day 100 ;-)

Day 55 - I had a perfect day!

I had 10 good naps in a row before screwing up. Day 54 (yesterday) was the first "perfect day" since I defined a "perfect day". FINALLY! :-)

I managed to maintain the good naps even through my normally bad block with minimal problem. Not sure what happened this morning, but somehow I decided to lay down at 2:30am without an alarm or anything... Ah well, at least I finally have some significant progress I can point to.

I haven't changed anything about how I'm taking my naps, I'm just plugging away at this CPAP thing.

As I've started to be more successful with my schedule I've started to notice that my internal sense of day it is has started to get screwy. For example, today is Thursday but it feels like Tuesday. It's very interesting.

Day 53 - Close but no cigar

So my current plan of sleeping with my CPAP/BIPAP machine and using a mouth guard along with my chin strap to prevent breathing through my mouth has its ups and downs (as with pretty much everything else I've tried so far).

It seems that 1-3 times a day I somehow manage to open my mouth regardless of all the precautions and it really throws a wrench in my schedule. Which means I STILL haven't managed to have a "perfect day" yet. To try to address the problem I've tried a few things ranging from even more draconian measures for keeping my mouth shut (tape doesn't work as well as you'd expect) to trying to "correct" a bad CPAP nap by taking a nap without it.

Nothing really works.

So once again I get CLOSER to the prize but it remains just out of reach.

The good news is my "bad time" of the day has reduced from the original 4am through 9am to a mere 4am through 7am. That's almost livable if I could sleep through that block. Of course I can't sleep longer than 1 hour (intentionally) without severe complications so that's still out of the question. I can sleep longer unintentionally but it sucks the big one.

Damn you sleep apnea, damn you to hell.

As always, I soldier on because it's still slightly better than the alternative (especially now that I know how badly I sleep when I sleep for more than an hour).

Anyone have any ideas how to keep my mouth closed? (Besides staples and/or crazy glue) I'm running out of ideas again :-)

Day 48 - Progress continues!

After posting yesterday I had a fabulous day nap-wise. I didn't even get all my naps in at the right times and I still felt great all day. I think last night would have been great too except I opened my mouth again, then followed that up (in my exhaustion) with 4 hours of sleeping on my back without my dental device. In other words, NOT SLEEPING AT ALL (unless you count 40 seconds of sleep at a time as sleep... I don't).

I did a bit of searching on Google and haven't seen anywhere else mention my particular solution, so I thought I'd share some more details. Some of this is going to be repetitive but I want to get it all down in a single post.

PROBLEM: With a CPAP/BIPAP machine you have to keep your mouth closed or wear a mask that covers both your mouth and nose in order for the CPAP to be effective. I have a beard which would cause quite a bit of leakage around the corners of all the mouth/nose masks I've seen so far. I wear a chin strap to keep my jaw shut, but I still open my lips and air escapes. Once I open my mouth the rest of the nap is pretty much shot since it never really closes again.

UNSUCCESSFUL THINGS I TRIED:

• Using an ace bandage instead of my chin strap to secure my jaw in place. This really kept my jaw in place, but this is where I found out that I'm opening my lips. Game over.
  
• Covering my mouth with various things to keep my lips closed (first I tried an ace bandage then a plastic bag and such). In all cases I'd eventually work it loose and open my lips. The beard didn't help here either since something like a plastic bag didn't end up forming any kind of seal, I could still easily breathe. Game over.
  
• I also tried many combinations with and without my dental device.

SOLUTION!

Eventually I had the idea to try something inside the mouth. So I constructed mouth guard (like in boxing, football or hockey) but made it airtight so that even if I open my lips, no air comes out of my mouth. I combined that with my chin strap to prevent opening my jaw and spitting out the mouth guard (which is what I did last night, oops). The result is amazing. It's like night and day.

Interestingly, after about 25-30 minutes of sleep so far I feel kinda like I'm suffocating (which I'm not but I think my body is so conditioned to breathing through my mouth all these years I panic) and I have to get up and remove the mouth guard. Pretty convenient alarm actually :-)

My hope is that eventually I'll condition myself to stop breathing through my mouth and at that point many of these extra things will be unnecessary. For now I'm just happy to be getting consistently good sleep.

Day 47 - Making progress again?

Call me superstitious, but I hate to say I'm making progress since the next thing that seems to happen is a new crisis. I'm going out on a limb here though because I think I've found a crucial problem AND I think I have a solution.

I was a little bored a few days ago so I thought I'd play around with eliminating background noise in my nap recordings (okay, so I was a little bored and overly obsessive...). I discovered something interesting during my occasional CPAP sleep: I had my mouth open for a while. It was hard to tell from the video and audio exactly how long, so I started playing around.

In case I haven't explained this before, most CPAP masks fit over or in your nose and do not cover your mouth. There are some that cover both your nose and mouth but I have a beard and I was told that they don't work very well with facial hair (hopefully that's no longer the case, but that's a different topic). So both of my masks only push air in through my nose.

To get an idea what that's like, imagine hooking up the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner (albeit a very small one) to something that you wear over your nose. Air is constantly being forced in your nose to keep your throat from closing and to keep you breathing properly. It's quite something to get used to sleeping with.

Anyway, now imagine that you have this thing on your nose and you open your mouth. Since everything in your throat is connected, the air that is being forced in your nose now starts coming out of your mouth rather than going down your throat to keep it open. This essentially negates the effect of the CPAP machine since the air goes down your nose and immediately out your mouth and doesn't help you keep breathing. Ack.

To make matters worse, the air escaping from your mouth creates a bit of a vacuum inside your mouth sucking the air out of your lungs and making it more difficult than usual to breathe. And that's when you're AWAKE.

So, that's why noticing my mouth open is a big deal. It's a bit of a double-whammy.

From the 6 months that I tried to make the CPAP work for me a couple years ago, I knew this mouth thing was a problem for me. I own a strap that goes around my head to hold my chin in place which in theory should keep my mouth closed. Unfortunately I was wearing said strap at the time, so it obviously wasn't terribly effective. This led me down the road of trying a few different things to keep my mouth closed while using the CPAP machine.

I just took a nap an hour ago where it looks like I successfully managed to breathe through my nose for the entire nap. It's evident in several spots that I'm TRYING to breathe through my mouth but eventually I give up and use my nose again. I even had about 15 minutes of REM sleep during that nap.

If I've licked the CPAP problem that means I'll get more consistently good naps and I may even be able to sleep a bit longer (an hour or 2) without so many problems.

One nap under my belt doesn't guarantee anything, but I'm very hopeful :-)

Day 44 - Difficulties continue

I think I might need to get another sleep study using my BIPAP machine. From looking at the video it's hard to tell for sure, but it seems like I'm getting pretty awful sleep using the thing: No more than 2-5 minutes of REM at a time, REM at very random times, and occasional very violent spasms (one or two per nap).

In addition, it appears even using the machine if I accidentally roll onto my back I have apnea episodes. Even with all of that though, whatever kind of sleep I get using the machine it seems to fill some need I have. It's hard to explain how frustrating it is to need (on some level) to sleep with a machine that leaves you feeling worse when you wake up than if you hadn't used it at all. Actually, I usually feel worse than if I hadn't slept at all.

So, night-time continues to be very inconsistent. Some days I'm awake and alert, most days I'm tired and feel like I need extra naps. Most of those extra naps still end up going badly (apnea, over-sleeps, whatever).

I think at the moment I've almost got the worst of both worlds in terms of time. I'm sleeping 4-7 hours a day (and the days I sleep 4 hours I feel worse many times) so not much extra time, AND my day is constantly interrupted by naps.

So, if it weren't for the fact that during the DAY I feel better than I've felt in years I'd be tempted to quit. Luckily (or unfortunately?) for me, that's all the motivation I seem to need to keep up with this thing.

I'm going to continue this "use the CPAP for extra naps" thing until I can get another sleep study to figure out exactly what the heck is wrong with this infernal machine. If they tell me it's fine again there's either something wrong with their equipment or something really wrong with me :)

Day 41 - Interesting combination

I haven't analyzed the video yet, but I slept for 3+ hours last night with my CPAP after a particularly bad (in terms of apnea) nap. I woke up groggy and hazy as usual. I took my normal 8:30 nap afterwards and I feel fairly decent.

I'm going to stick with this current plan of using my CPAP anytime I feel like I need more sleep (for whatever reason) for a while. I'm thinking I may settle into a routine of a core sleep of 1-3 hours per day using the CPAP, and the rest of my sleep will be non-CPAP naps.

Since this is pretty different from what I expected when I decided to try the CPAP again (in a positive way), I'm going to blog more frequently again for the next week or two with the results. At least using this strategy I'll avoid apnea during any longer sleep periods. It really really sucked looking at a 4-6 hour sleep and seeing that I only got 1-2 hours of REST.

The most annoying thing about sleeping too long...

I think the most annoying thing about sleeping longer than I intended is that the quality of sleep sucks so badly. I lose the waking time and I don't have anything to show for it.

Here's a good example: I slept for 6 hours last night because I wasn't feeling well. It looks like I got maybe an hour to hour and a half of restful sleep out of that at most.

I'm going to try something new. If I, for whatever odd reason at the time, decide to lay back down immediately following a nap I'm going to use my CPAP machine. At least then I'll get SOME form of restful sleep, even though it might not be REM.

I also can't seem to shake the last bits of being sick. Now my sinuses are more clear but I have a sore throat. Argh. Hopefully sleeping with the CPAP will at least help me recover finally.

Day 39 - CPAP results

For those waiting with baited breath for the results of my CPAP test yesterday, here goes:

Didn't work.

I did discover something interesting and, if it's true of a full night as well, very disturbing. During a "normal" nap without any apnea episodes and without the CPAP machine, I seem to get somewhere between 15 and 19 minutes of REM as near as I can tell (I don't actually analyze every nap for REM since it's kinda hard to spot). During my three naps last night with the CPAP machine I consistently got 5 minutes of REM sleep per nap.

My first nap with the CPAP machine was interrupted after 8 minutes by a big spasm. Not something that typically happens to me. I took a second CPAP nap (hey, that rhymes) right away because the first was so short. Between the two naps I got about 10 minutes of REM, which was fine.

The third nap, the 4:30am one, was STILL only 5 minutes of REM. That did me in. I crashed and woke up 90 minutes later. Unfortunately I didn't wear my CPAP or dental device for the 90 minute sleep so it was pretty much a waste.

So now what? I dunno. I'll probably take the occasional nap with the CPAP just to see if the 5 minute thing really is consistent. Beyond that I'm out of ideas of things to really try... Maybe I'll just schedule my life around what I've managed to accomplish so far. Scheduling core sleep didn't go well either, so the biggest annoyance with my current "schedule" is that it's not predictable (and hence not much of a schedule).

At this point I can definitely say I'm polyphasic since I can't function well without my naps anymore, but I'm far from being truly hexaphasic. The upside is that I definitely feel better for large sections of the day than I did before starting this schedule. I like that. I just wish it were more of the day and more consistent.

EDIT: Oh, and I don't plan to post much from here on unless something big happens. Except for my nap script, I still need to post that for sure :-)

Day 38 - Not a single successful day in the past 9 days

In my last real post I mentioned I was aiming for a perfect hexaphasic week. I had planned to start with an easy goal of 3 consecutive days.

Well, 9 days later I haven't had a single successful day according to the guidelines I laid out. I've had a few close ones (days where I slept for an hour once for example) but none "perfect". Part of the problem is I'm defining "day" not in the sense of 24 hours but in the sense of midnight to midnight. I've had lots of perfect 24 hour periods but none have spanned midnight to midnight.

It seems like when I have a problem nap, the next 24 hours tends to go fairly well. After that however, things fall apart again.

Summary of news:

• I gave up the vegetarian diet 11 days ago (forgot to mention that before). I haven't noticed any difference in nap quality or the number of problems. Not that I've been tracking that stuff scientifically :-) I can definitely say that the video evidence doesn't show any difference since starting to eat meat again.
• I slept a solid 6.5 hour block one day intentionally. I had always intended to have one long block periodically and I felt a little ill so I went ahead and slept through a night. I had no problems resuming my (fitful) polyphasic schedule immediately following.
• I've been stuffed up off and on for the past few weeks, ever since I got sick the first time. I can't seem to get my sinuses to drain and stay clear. Since blocked sinuses reduces air flow I'm betting this has something to do with why I can't seem to adapt fully.

Except for the rare nap I still don't remember my dreams. I've never remembered my dreams so I guess I don't find that too surprising, but I'm a bit disappointed. I was definitely looking forward to the whole "lucid dream" thing, but the closest I've gotten was a really bizarre nap where I was half-conscious and observing my dreams, but had no control over them. Fortunately I wasn't actually a part of any of the dreams that time.

I've continued using the catnapper CD, but I made a few modifications to it. The original has 2-3 minutes of instruction at the beginning and 1-2 minutes of just noise at the end. I removed those and at the end I substituted my effective but annoying alarm (about 25 minutes worth of my alarm actually... Just in case :) ). Saving 5-10 minutes per nap nets me an extra 30-60 minutes per day of waking time.

I haven't actually slept through an alarm in a long time, but I still reset the alarm once or sometimes even twice after a nap without really waking up fully. Not good. I developed the habit of these "back-to-back" naps while I was still struggling with my apnea every nap. I now consider these instances to be severe lapses in discipline, but I haven't succeeded in wiping them out entirely. They are definitely the biggest remaining challenge to fully adapting to this schedule.

Which brings me to my apnea. Video evidence suggests that I'm down to 3-5 apnea episodes per DAY at this point during my regular naps (when I was first diagnosed with apnea I was experiencing 70+ episodes per HOUR, or close to 500 per DAY). Unfortunately when I sleep longer (either turning off the alarm and rolling over, or resetting the alarm) I still have lots of apnea problems. The MOST unfortunate thing is that the naps that have even a single apnea episode are the ones that turn into problems nearly every time.

As for ways to combat the apnea episodes I'm finally down to my last idea: The dreaded CPAP machine (actually in my case it's a BIPAP, but it's the same principal just a more expensive machine). I had such an incredibly negative experience with this infernal device that I actually started this whole hexaphasic plan just to avoid ever having to use it again. At this point I can only hope (hope hope) that using it for short <30 minute segments will be a completely different experience to using it for an entire night.

I'm not sure if I ever described my CPAP problems, but the short story is I would wake up feeling like a truck hit me, backed up, ran over me again, and then the driver got out and kicked me a couple times for good measure. I was told I was getting much better quality sleep when I used it, but subjectively I felt like a complete zombie. To be fair, I never had a sleep study done while using my exact machine and mask. It's quite possible that there's something very wrong with the settings and/or mask I'm using. Unfortunately, I tried in vain to make it work for about 6 months before giving up. At this point my reaction to it is kind of like what happens when you get food poisoning... I just don't even want to look at the MENU for that restaurant anymore.

So here I am, in desperation, trying it again. If I can find all the parts, my first BIPAP nap will be Tuesday at 12:30am. Fingers crossed....