“Dr. Zarkov! There’s no sun! It’s 8:24 in the morning, and there’s no sun!”
(a quote from the awesome 1980 movie, Flash Gordon)
It’s very eerie outside. The news says that smoke from wildfires is being held at very high altitudes, obscuring the sun and making the world appear red. Sunrise was at 6:46am but, OMG, it’s 8:24 in the morning and there’s no sun!
Yesterday the weather report was for a second 95 degree day in a row. But instead of it being smokey and unbearably hot (Google’s forecast , it was cool and… apocalyptic. I’m very done with 2020.
I tried to take a photo of the effect by my camera… well, my camera didn’t believe the sky was the color the way it is. I color corrected these images to be close to correct. But it is, in fact, redder, darker and more apocalyptic.
I’ve been using a CPAP since 2015 to stop my snoring and sleep apnea. It’s great! Lemme tell you some things about my experience. I can’t believe I haven’t written more about this!
With a CPAP, I need 1 hr less sleep per night AND I wake up more rested AND my throat doesn’t hurt every day AND my wife tolerates the sound way better than hearing me snore, snoore, snooore, snoooooooore, SILENCE SILENCE SILENCE [oh god is Lee going to die????] SILENCE SILENCE gaaaaaasp! [phew!] snoore [damnit]
If you’re thinking that maybe you want to look into this stuff, here’s what I suggest. Figure out for yourself what your sleep experience is and whether it could be better. What matters is YOUR impression, not mine, and not some doctor’s! That said, it’s hard for you to know what things “should” be like because you are the only one with your sleep condition. I strongly support that you measure what is going on in your sleep-life. Start with the easiest measurements!
Keep a sleep log for a few weeks (just write down your daily impressions of sleep every night)
Ask your sleep partner what their impression of your sleep is. Ask them a few times over a few weeks.
Get a free app like Snoreclock to listen to you sleeping. If you hear your snoring and/or sleep apnea for yourself, you’ll have a better idea as to what’s going on!
I tried pointing a webcam at me while sleeping a few times but it kinda weirded me out watching myself sleep!
Keeping a sleep-log for few weeks was useful for me. I noticed that I was more groggy in the morning when I had been snoring (and apnea-ing), even when I’d sleep for 9-10 hours. Actually, sleeping longer was WORSE for me, which makes sense because of having less oxygen going to my brain for longer. Getting input from my wife was somewhat helpful, “Did I snore last night?” “I don’t know but you kept me up all night.” “What?”
You might be tempted to wait to investigate this sleep thing. Maybe you’re thinking you’ll wait until you’ve lost weight. Yes, weight loss usually helps sleep and sleep apnea. But why wait for to lose weight when you can approach the solution from multiple directions? Similarly, meditation helps get rid of headaches, but ibuprofen is in your medicine cabinet! Use it!
I have seen 4 sleep doctors and my impression is to not trust them but instead trust your own experience and research. Every sleep specialist told me “Oh yeah, you need a CPAP” but they couldn’t help me get it working well without me putting in all the work myself to get it working. “You’ve ben using it 4 hours per night, that’s great.” “It doesn’t feel great.” “Well, some people don’t tolerate it any longer.” “Really? You’ve got nothing?” My friend went to a surgeon for his sleep troubles and the surgeon recommended (I’ll let you guess…..) surgery! He never even recommended a sleep study. He wrote me last week “Yeah, that was the weird thing, the doctor who took out the uvula / tonsils / turbinets didn’t even bother getting a sleep study, and I never had one as a followup. So I’m sure it made things better the issue would be if it made them better enough. I’m only now considering that it might not have been sufficient.” Caveat emptor!
My experience is that when I don’t use the CPAP, my throat and tongue relax, blocking my airway. So I snore loudly and have apnea. Apnea means that maybe 20 times an hour while sleeping, I stop breathing for about 30 seconds until my brain says “Hey, wake up and breathe or you’ll die!” This whole unfortunate process means that oxygen saturation goes down, I wake up a little hundreds of times a night, and I just don’t sleep well! But when I’m wearing my CPAP, the air pushes all the wiggly bits out of the way, I don’t snore, don’t apnea and wake up refreshed!
9.9 hours on the CPAP last night, hurray!
At first I had a lot of issues with using it. I struggled for almost a year every night trying to get it to fit well and increase my compliance (ie. how long I would wear it before ripping it off in frustration every night). At first, I wore it 2-3 hours per night, which simply isn’t enough. Now I almost always wake up in the morening wearing it, which is awesome!
Here’s all that I did to wear my mask all night:
Fit – I tried a lot of things to get a better fit. What did it for me was getting a Large full-face mask. I’m using a Resmed Airfit F20. I had been to 4 clinics and… I’ll tell you what, none of them wanted to take the frigging mask out of the package to let me try it on because if it didn’t fit, they’d have to expense it. I finally got a sleep tech at Kaiser Richmond to let me try on some masks. I was the one to ask, strongly, for a Large mask and he opened the package. I wore it for 30 seconds in the clinic and I could immediately tell it felt better than the Mediums that was “supposed” to be the right fit for me.
The right mask got me 80% of the way there. I also shave before bed, it’s no bother with an electric razor. And I wash the mask in hot soapy water every week; if I don’t, I have to keep tightening it to keep it from leaking which eventually doesn’t work well. I also sometimes clean the mask with isopropyl alcohol. With soap and alcohol my masks last a long time! I had tried a mess of other techniques with moderate success.
Maybe you can use a nose-only mask but when I tried one in the sleep clinic, as I fell asleep, the air would go in my nose and right out my mouth which is wei-eerd!
Other issues I’ve tackled….
Appearance – At the very beginning, I was very concerned about it looking dorky or blocking my view or… blah blah blah. Screw that. No one sees you in bed except people that will ALWAYS want you to wear it since it stops you from snoring. I tried a couple sleep appliances and they all sucked. CPAP is the first line treatment for Obstructive Sleep Apnea (definitely get a free Medscape account and check out that link!). I had tried a tongue suction thing, a chin strap, and a mouthguard and they were silly. The second-line treatment for apnea is ALSO CPAP: a fancy CPAP machine called a BiPAP. Surgery is the distant-third option.
Every sleep specialist I visited knew about the same about sleep and CPAP usage that I did. There’s really not that much to know. If you think your CPAP problems can be resolved by going to yet another specialist, you may be overvaluing their lab-coats. I am still pissed at how much each specialist charged my medical insurance for what I got. My sleep evaluation was ten THOUSAND dollars and the result was them saying, “Yup, you stop breathing because of your snoring. A CPAP will probably help. Here, maybe this one will fit. Good luck. Good bye.” The mask fitting session was terrible, their bedside manner was terrible, their billing was terrible, administrative help terrible.
I thank them for my sleep apnea diagnosis but my experience could have gone much better. A thousand cuts: they could have warned me about the goop they were going to put in my hair for the polysomnography and not lied about that being in the written materials they gave me. The admin people on the phone were weird and unhelpful in many ways. They didn’t help AT ALL with me getting a mask, which resulted in me spending another YEAR trying to find one that fit better. They asked me to sign paperwork that they hadn’t read themselves “Oh, its standard stuff” they said but it wasn’t. And all this terrible service for charging my insurance $10k. Hurumph.
On my Resmed CPAP, I push these 2 buttons simultaneously to change settings
I adjust the settings on the CPAP myself. My max pressure is set to 13.8, min pressure is 8.8. Last week, for the first time in maybe two years, I adjusted the pressure: I changed the max pressure from 13.6 to 13.8 because Megan was saying I was having multiple apneas in a night. My chest felt a little stretched for a night by the additional pressure but it solved the problem immediately. If you change the settings yourself, do it slowly! If you push the pressure too high, you may get central sleep apnea which means that you never exhale, which could be, you know, bad. If you set it too low, you’ll feel like you’re not getting enough air and you’ll rip the mask off at night. Initially, I changed the settings a moderate amount over a few weeks and it helped. At the very beginning, I kept going back for doctor’s appointments for them to change the settings and it was a big hassle. In a few nights of fiddling, I had it dialed in much better than their settings.
I tried using software to look at my CPAP usage patterns. I used Sleepyhead and ResScan from Resmed, None really helped dial in the reason for me not wearing except to help me focus on the problem. Using the free Snoreclock Android app was helpful. I never paid for it and it worked great. The use-case: It would record audio the whole evening and the next morning it would display red areas on a chart when I was snoring. I’d zoom in and look at the volume chart to see if I may have stopped breathing at any time. Then I’d listen to the zoomed-in audio. One hint: It displays different screens when you rotate your phone.
Here’s another tidbit: the manual says I’m supposed to buy a new mask, mask holder, air hose, and humidifier tray every 3 months or so. At first I was buying the stuff like I was supposed to. I’d buy it through my insurance with a co-pay. But then I figured two things: first, most of the items are much less expensive on Amazon than through insurance ($25 mask instead of $50 COPAY for the same item?!) Second, the only regular maintenance I’ve needed is to replace the air filter every 6 months, wash the mask weekly, and replace the mask and mask holder yearly or so. If I was using a humidifier, I could understand a need to keep things cleaner.
To deal with the smoke in the air, I put a MERV 13 furnace filter on our forced-air system, sealed up the forced-air ducts with aluminum tape (great stuff!) and put a MERV 13 filter on a fan. It’s woring well!
I had noticed that the air coming out of the vents had a slight odor… certainly more odor than the air in the house in general. So I went under the house for a look. I lit a match and blew it out near the air intake: I saw the smoke being drawn into the system and my family immediately noticed the smell in the house! They shouldn’t have smelled it! There were 3 places where I found leaks:
in the air intake manifold in the house: I stuck my head into the intake and taped it up.
under the house where the air intake manifold is.
Where the ductwork goes into the furnace itself.
I used aluminum tape (not “duct tape!) to seal it up and it helped a LOT!
And Dave shared his “cheapo hepa pet dander filter” with me :-)
Welp, it’s wildfire season in Northern California. I just got finished sealing up the intake of our heating system. The smoke outside is pretty bad. The air filter does a lot to help.
It’s an overcast day but not foggy, that’s smoke in the street
If the smoke in the bay area has your throat feeling down, get a good furnace filter and clean your indoor air. It works wonders. We swapped out our regular MERV 8 for a MERV 13 and the house feels so much more like home! If your fan switch on your furnace doesn’t work, you can probably temporarily rewire it at the furnace so “heat” turns on the fan.
Here’s how we rewired a friend’s house that only had 2 wires. I used this guide to show what wires go where.
After putting the filter on, I still smelled smoke through the vents. Air was leaking into the system under the house! I went under the house and used aluminum duct sealing tape to seal up the joins in the air intake system. I sealed the join between the intake register and the intake plenum, and between the intake plenum and the furnace itself. It involved a lot of crawling around in right spaces but was worth it! To check the system, I lit a match and blew it out: I could see where the smoke was being pulled in to the system and my family could smell the smoke in the house. When I was done, the smoke was not being pulled in and my family could only barely smell the smoke inside the house. I also used my daughter’s walkie talkies to ask how the smell was upstairs. Hurray!
What is spinning around my head in a bad way this morning? Nearby forest fire smoke in our house, a heat wave, distance learning, the pandemic, and our fascist narcissist idiot president and those suckered in by him.
9-1-20 Update: I got an eero mesh router with 3 nodes for the house and it’s great :-)
My single-router hopes are dashed: I got a pretty good one (TP-Link Archer A7) but the kitchen appliances block the far side of the house no matter what I do. I thought about rewiring stuff in the crawlspace to relocate the router but I’d rather just pay money to fix the problem.
I’ve got a 2-day old powerline wifi adapter sitting on my desk. the trouble is, none of my computing devices are nailed down. Mannually switching networks every time I go into or out of my music room is a terrible option!
In the living room, I have a great signal on my laptop on my router. When I bring my laptop into the music room, I’ve got a crappy signal to the router and a great signal on the wifi extender. But my computer doesn’t switch over to the extender, it suffers it’s way through my refrigerator.
We are thinking about getting a Little Free Library. I wrote to a neighbor with one about their experience and got a really great response. If you’re thinking of getting one, read on:
I wrote, “Hi, we saw that you have a Little Free Library. We live just down the road and were wondering how it has worked out for you. Any tips? We’re thinking of getting one for our front yard. :-)”
Their response:
Hi Lee and Megan- 4 households in a row put up the LFL. I am the steward of it. Surprisingly, it has been slow during COVID. We keep it filled though. And I wipe it down with disinfectant every day. I see people looking at it regularly and people donate as well. People leave boxes of books on my front porch. I cull from my own collection. What we are low in are children’s picture books.
During precovid we had BART commuters checking it out so that was good. Our library has been swept a couple of times (that’s when someone comes and takes all of them). Nothing we can really do about that. But if they were going for a group in need that would be ok. But these sweepers I think take them and try to sell them.
Joining the group on Facebook or getting the LFL email gives some good info.
The object to me is get people reading.
Let me know if you have any other questions. Hope you do it! L S / Junction LFL
Do you want a power rack or other home gym equipment? (and COVID making it both nessesary and hard to get?) A good friend and professional fabricator will be building and selling a set of about 10 power racks and other equipment in the Bay Area. He’s aiming for it to be competitively priced and (of course) local pickup/delivery.
If you need to download a video on Youtube or Vimeo or wherever, this process will often do it for you, fer free and without downloading some likely-spammy-scammy software.
The key is: most video online is HTML5. VLC can play any HTML5 video… and get you the link to download it. (via)
