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.