First Night: At Home With The CPAP

I’ve pretty much covered the events leading up to actually getting the CPAP machine. Since the third sleep study went fairly well I had high hopes this was going to work. When I got home I immediately made a place on the nightstand for it, got everything out and took a few minutes to get the mask and all adjusted. About 10pm I popped an Ambien and grabbed the XBOX controller figuring if it was like anything else I’ve taken it’ll take a little while to “get sleepy”. HAH! After about 10 minutes I had to walk “leaning” to get to bed, so I crawled in, got the mask on, hit the ramp and laid down. I pretty much don’t remember anything after that except that I woke up around 4:30am and the mask was lying on the floor. According to the machine I’d kept it on about 3.5 hours.

Figuring it would take time to adjust I took a notepad and logged the time thinking if I kept track I could see improvement over time. It would ultimately prove to be an exercise in futility for a number of reasons I’ll mention in a later post.

For now one of the first questions I get asked is why take the Ambien. Simple, I have the hardest time going to sleep. Probably not full blown Insomnia but if things aren’t “just right” I can’t go to sleep, so knowing the mask was going to throw things out of kilter the Ambien was intended to get me to sleep quickly while I adjusted to the CPAP/mask.

Still, I thought 3.5 hours was pretty good the first night and I felt better the next day or at least thought I did and at the time not remembering taking the mask off didn’t concern me but that would change pretty quickly, me and the Ambien didn’t get along too well.

I doubt my “first night” experience is very different than many other people. In retrospect I can say that “expecting to have problems” was most likely a contributing factor to having problems even though I thought I was prepared.

What was your “first night” experience like? Did you have trouble or did you go right to sleep?