Please call your Sleep Center or whatever your clinic calls it to get your machine adjusted correctly. It should not be blowing back into your face so hard that you feel like you cannot exhale. This equipment takes some tinkering with to get it working right and it is their job to do this for you.
I have very mixed feelings about the CPAP industry. The equipment clearly helps a lot of people, but I suspect it is over-prescribed. It may be exactly what you need and you should certainly pursue it, but bear in mind that some pretty sketchy actors are making a lot of money off this and take everything they tell you with a grain of salt.
The secret pricing and indecipherable reordering process for the equipment is pretty hair raising, and sets off all my bullshit detectors. Somewhere in the packet of information they gave you is probably a "price list" for each a la carte component of that sleep machine. The prices listed there are ludicrously inflated. If you scrutinize every bill and invoice that you get you can eventually figure out what the insurance company is actually paying and how much of that cost is passed on to you (20-25% in my case). The list price is actually about 5 times the actual cost to the insurance company. For instance, the machine itself is listed at $3500 but Health Partners was actually charged $800 and I paid about $200. A 2-pack of disposable filters is listed at $18, but the actual cost was $3, and I was charged about $.80. I'm not sure who is making out like bandits from this discrepancy and lack of transparency, but I'm pretty sure somebody is.
You will also find that reordering components is extremely awkward and confusing. They really really want you to put the whole process on automatic and let them sell you new items at the minimal legal interval whether you need them or not. But since most of the time you DON'T need to replace the stuff that often I refused to do that, which left me in a swamp of confusion over the difference between headgear, mask, and frame or whether I needed "cushions" or "pillows."
And that MyAir report you've been getting is mostly useless. It comes from the manufacturer, which is primarily interested in making sure that you use the equipment as much as possible. So they track every minute of usage but are pretty vague on whether it is actually reducing your apnea episodes or improving your sleep in any way. It will continue to be annoyingly condescending ("Great job, Peg! You win a gold star sticker!") If you actually care about the data you can request a smart card to insert into the machine which you can read yourself with easily available free software. You probably don't care about that much detail, but if you do I can tell you how to do it. It's actually pretty interesting if you are into medical minutiae.
But what really matters is whether the machine improves your sleep experience more than it degrades it. For me, the balance was really close, but in the end I decided it was worth it. For some people, it is apparently a much more obvious improvement. Here's hoping you are one of those. But if you aren't, don't be discouraged if it takes 3 months or more to get used to the machine and figure out how to get the most out of it for your needs.
no subject
I have very mixed feelings about the CPAP industry. The equipment clearly helps a lot of people, but I suspect it is over-prescribed. It may be exactly what you need and you should certainly pursue it, but bear in mind that some pretty sketchy actors are making a lot of money off this and take everything they tell you with a grain of salt.
The secret pricing and indecipherable reordering process for the equipment is pretty hair raising, and sets off all my bullshit detectors. Somewhere in the packet of information they gave you is probably a "price list" for each a la carte component of that sleep machine. The prices listed there are ludicrously inflated. If you scrutinize every bill and invoice that you get you can eventually figure out what the insurance company is actually paying and how much of that cost is passed on to you (20-25% in my case). The list price is actually about 5 times the actual cost to the insurance company. For instance, the machine itself is listed at $3500 but Health Partners was actually charged $800 and I paid about $200. A 2-pack of disposable filters is listed at $18, but the actual cost was $3, and I was charged about $.80. I'm not sure who is making out like bandits from this discrepancy and lack of transparency, but I'm pretty sure somebody is.
You will also find that reordering components is extremely awkward and confusing. They really really want you to put the whole process on automatic and let them sell you new items at the minimal legal interval whether you need them or not. But since most of the time you DON'T need to replace the stuff that often I refused to do that, which left me in a swamp of confusion over the difference between headgear, mask, and frame or whether I needed "cushions" or "pillows."
And that MyAir report you've been getting is mostly useless. It comes from the manufacturer, which is primarily interested in making sure that you use the equipment as much as possible. So they track every minute of usage but are pretty vague on whether it is actually reducing your apnea episodes or improving your sleep in any way. It will continue to be annoyingly condescending ("Great job, Peg! You win a gold star sticker!") If you actually care about the data you can request a smart card to insert into the machine which you can read yourself with easily available free software. You probably don't care about that much detail, but if you do I can tell you how to do it. It's actually pretty interesting if you are into medical minutiae.
But what really matters is whether the machine improves your sleep experience more than it degrades it. For me, the balance was really close, but in the end I decided it was worth it. For some people, it is apparently a much more obvious improvement. Here's hoping you are one of those. But if you aren't, don't be discouraged if it takes 3 months or more to get used to the machine and figure out how to get the most out of it for your needs.