Last Tuesday, I sat in my pulmonologist's office for my annual check-up, exhausted as usual despite using my CPAP religiously every night.
"Still tired?" Dr. Peterson asked, looking at my chart. "Are you cleaning your equipment?"
"Every single day," I told her proudly. "Thirty minutes of scrubbing with soap and water, just like the manual says."
What she showed me next made my stomach turn.
She pulled up a microscope image on her computer. "This is from a patient's 'clean' CPAP hose - someone who washed it yesterday, just like you."
The image showed thousands of bacteria colonies living in the grooves I could never reach with my brush. Pink mold. Biofilm. All thriving in the moisture left behind from my "thorough" cleaning.
"Your brush can physically reach maybe 5% of your CPAP's surface area," she explained. "The other 95%? That's where the problems live."