First night – Debbie's experience (LONG post)

Debbie is my co-worker who also got the same model of MAD as me (I ordered hers at the same time I ordered mine). Debbie has the physical build of someone you could just look at and assume they have apnea. She's been chronically tired, and it's been getting worse. She also gets achy or restless legs (but can't take meds for it because of kidney disease and the high blood pressure medications she's on).

Debbie molded her mouthpieces according to the written instructions. She started to second guess herself and couldn't remember from the video if the part with the screw was the top piece or the bottom (the video was at work, since it was an .avi, so had to be viewed via computer, which she doesn't have at home), so she told herself to just re-read through the written documentation and follow the written instructions strictly. She got a good fit the first time and didn't trim anything.

She experienced no discomfort, just the awkwardness of having something so different in her mouth. She does have several back teeth missing, but with the AP managed to get a good fit anyway ... so however many teeth she has missing weren't too many. The Classic and 2.0 you really shouldn't use if you've many missing teeth, and the AP not if you have "too many" missing teeth ... I'm not sure how many "too many" is, but Debbie was just fine.

When she went to bed, she started getting all these "what if" sorts of thoughts going through her head. But she told herself they were all mental. She has a major phobia of dentists, so told herself that all those thoughts were simply a phobia and were just mental. She reminded herself that she decided to give this a GENUINE try after putting out the money for the AP, so would not give up after a few of her phobias and would give her body time to adjust and overcome any discomforts. After doing that, she easily fell asleep (which she never does anymore), and only got up to use the restroom once in the night and immediately fell back asleep (which, again, she never does—usually if she wakes in the night she'll never be able to fall back asleep).

The ONLY discomfort she had when trying to sleep were achy legs, which we're sure are simply barometric pressure pain (she can't do the salt pushes I recommend for this sort of pain because of her kidney disease).

She had no jaw discomfort, no jaw pain. And definitely had a good sleep. She's still tired, but she puts it down to a big sleep debt. She did also have the bite readjustment I did, but it quickly went back to normal in the morning after taking the device out.

Now, she says she's can't confirm one way or the other just yet whether her good night's sleep last night was due to the MAD or due to her mentally psyching herself when she went to bed to calm her thoughts and relax. But it was definitely a good sleep experience, which she has not had (and I can confirm this from our conversations over time) for more than a year. But I can tell you that I personally think it was the MAD because she's tried psyching herself in the past to try to get herself to relax and fall asleep when she's had onset insomnia and it hadn't worked.

I will keep you updated on her, because I think improvements for her will be really obvious, really quickly. I think by Monday if she's slept good every night up to then, that's a major turnaround for her since she never has several good nights of sleep in a row.