Hello all. I discovered your little group when I was following sleep apnea leads in Google and have been keeping an eye on it. Someone posted about a helpful site and I wanted to add another.

I have been reading the American Sleep Apnea Assoc. Forums for almost a year now and recommend them. There is a lot of information on sleep apnea and the forums can be very helpful when you have questions or problems. They are especially helpful when talking about masks, their pros and cons.

Did you know, by the way, that there is a new mask called a hybrid mask which consists of nasal pillows combined with a section that covers the mouth and is therefore helpful for mouth breathers?

As for me, at the moment I'm the wife of a person with OSA. My husband has been using a CPAP machine since Jan.'06 and is getting along quite well. He has been very persistent at overcoming his problems because he says that his titration study showed just how helpful the machine could be.

I say "at the moment" because it does seem possibile that I also have sleep disordered breathing. I have been a poor sleeper for years but last winter I became a full blown insomniac with some odd symptoms. I also began to get panic attacks, more or less out of the blue.

I agreed to my doctor's suggestion of a sleep study with my husband's successful sleep studies in mind but unfortunately, I went to the sleep study in a very anxious state of mind and couldn't complete it. If the technician had talked to me about the way I was feeling I might have gathered the courage to stay but he simply agreed to unwire me and I went home in the middle of the night. But they got one hour of sleep which showed a whole passel of hypopneas. The sleep doctor said it wasn't really enough on which to come to any conclusions and suggested that I leave the problem for some months to see how I felt later.

In the meantime, I am on medication for the anxiety and they are under control but not gone. I'm am seeing the doctor this week about that and expect a change in my medication.

In the meantime, I am usually getting to sleep reasonably soon after I go to bed and going back to sleep after I wake up for my nightly trip to the bathroom so I should be feeling rested but I'm not. So it looks as if I need to investigate the matter some more and that sounds like another sleep study. There are times when I think I can cope with that and times when I think I can't. But I won't be doing anything about it for a couple of months because we are going for a month-long trip with our trailer starting in Sept.