Hi,
I'm Sharon Michalove and I joined the forum a few days ago. Mike asked me to write about my experience with getting my CPAP machine.
I had a sleep study in February and saw a sleep doctor soon afterwards. While my sleep apea is relatively mild, I have a very large drop in my oxygen level during REM sleep, which meant I ended up with a split sleep study rather than a purely diagnostic one. My doctor prescribed a CPAP machine with heat and humidity and the sleep lab recommended a setting of 13 with a C-Flex of 3.
I used Apria as my provided since my HMO uses them and because they are close to my house and my husband had had a good experience with them. They gave me a Respironics M Series and I had a 45 minute appointment with a respiratory specialist who showed me how to use the machine and made me practice with both the machine and the mask after making sure the mask fit. She called me every week to make sure I was using the machine and not having any problems.
After two weeks I had sores on the bridge of my nose and under my nose so I called and they had me come in that day to be fitted for a new mask. I am now using an Opus mask with nasal pillows that works much better. However, when I went for a followup with my doctor I did tell him that I still had problems with waking up 5 to 6 times during the night and still being tired in the morning. After looking at my sleep results again, he decided having a pressure of 13 all night was probably too much and that I would be better off with a machine that automatically judged how much oxygen I actually needed.
Today I went in for my new machine. The therapist apologized for not having a comparable M series machine. So now I have been upgraded to a S8 series machine. Again, I had instructions on how to use the machine, clean it, etc. Apria had worked with both the doctor's office and my HMO to get all the paperwork taken care of. So I didn't have to do anything except go in for the appointment.
The therapist did tell me that not all branches of Apria offer the same level of service. In fact, she said that some of her relatives in a large city north of here have not had the same level of service that her branch is expected to provide. All I can say is that I am glad that I live in Champaign-Urbana. I have had nothing but good experiences with Apria here and I know that if I have any issues with my equipment I can expect really good service very quickly.
I don't know that this is helpful information for anyone, but I can say that if you aren't getting good service from Apria, you might cite Champaign-Urbana as an example of where they do things right and ask why you can't get service like that where you are.
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