I had an appointment with the Respiratory Specialist last week. Not much has changed, but we ended up having a bit of a chat about all of the extra stress my heart is under due to the state of my lungs.
I already know that my heart is enlarged and I have secondary pulmonary hypertension. During the day, if I'm sitting still, it pumps along at about 100 bpm, trying desperately to push oxygenated blood around my body. What it does at night is anyones guess!
But in the interests of finding out, there were two choices:
- Invest in an overnight recordable pulse oximeter so that I could monitor my oxygen levels and heart rate overnight
- Go to hospital for an overnight stay and monitoring
I guess you can imagine which one I chose!
So, here are the results from the first overnight study on my normal overnight oxygen flowrate - 2 litres per minute.
I have terrible trouble getting to sleep every night, so the first hour of monitoring I'm probably just lying in bed tossing and turning and still awake.
It looks like my oxygen level and my heart rate both drop once I'm asleep.
So the next step is to turn the flow rate up to 2.5 litres per minute overnight and see what effect that has.
...to be continued
5 comments:
Wishing you sweet oxygenated dreams Cam.
Hopefully that will make your sleep a bit better?? Funky new toy, anyway! that's about the size of the camera they filmed the sky dive with!
How easy (or not) is it to sleep all wired up, not to mention your usual hook up?
Flash new toy! How interesting to know what your body gets up to while you sleep. You've got some big deep troughs there in your SpO2. Do you regularly get down that low when you're awake as well? I know that anything under 90 is not so good because I made the machine beep a few times when I got down to 87-89.
thats really neat to see actually, obviously not a good health thing but still interesting to see all that data
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