VikingOSX wrote:
Why are you downloading data from the CPAP data card each morning? Geez.
Because I have RERA and am still trying to fine-tune my settings to get the number of arousals down to something that doesn't leave me totally punked all of the time. Thursday night I woke up 15 times, and the longest I was asleep was 1hr 42min, even though my AHI was only 0.5. The only way that I know what happened is that I read my card and analyzed it in Sleepyhead. Which is excellent software that runs on macs, unix and windows.
VikingOSX wrote:
My SD card stays in the CPAP on six month cycles — the frequency requested by the respiratory team that downloads/plots the data to their specialized equipment/software. In 3 years, no data has ever been lost by leaving the card in the machine, or any apnea episodes recorded.
You would be an unusually lucky patient if the "respiratory team" cares about ANYTHING other than your hours of use, which have to be above a certain level or the insurance company won't pay. As long as you don't take your mask off, you count as "compliant" -- even if the reason that you didn't take your mask off is that you had a heart attack and died in your sleep. As in you couldn't take the mask off because you were dead.
Their "specialized software" is ResScan, which totally *****, and only runs on windoze. The latest version of Windows 8 will corrupt the card unless you slide the write-protect tab on. So it's really plausible that the exact machine that they need to run the software will be the machine that corrupts the card.
VikingOSX wrote:
...or any apnea episodes recorded.
Everyone has a couple of apneas here or there, they are normal, especially if you are awake, and a cpap machine cannot detect whether you are asleep or not. If they tell you that you never had ANY apneas over six months, then one of three things is true:
- Your machine is a brick and the only thing that it is recording is how much time you spent with it strapped on. It could have worthless settings on it and not be working at all for your medical condition and you could be having apneas all night. You would have no way of knowing how much damage was being done to your body until you had a stroke or heart attack.
- The "respiratory team" is lying to you when they tell you that there are no events, or more likely, they are lying when they say they checked your data for events and they just don't know.
- You are actually dead and just haven't noticed. (Did you vote in Chicago in the last election?)
VikingOSX wrote:
...the CPAP could potentially stop working if the data fails a CRC check when the CPAP machine restarts. If you have ever had a machine fail over some spurious error code, you know how tired you get before a machine replacement happens.
Which is PRECISELY what I am worried about happening. If I take my one-and-only data card to my doctor, and they twiddle with the write-protect tab and put it in a win8 machine with it writeable, then their stupid windows computer WILL corrupt my one-and-only data card. I'm concerned about the card simply failing, too -- I've been a sysadmin for 34 years and I know that all media eventually wears out, and cheap media (like sd cards) is more likely to fail long before it should.
