I have sleep apnea and been on CPAP therapy for nearly 30 years. My narcoleptic wife’s treatment led me to her physician and the diagnosis. My initial symptom was a slight reduction in short term memory. But once diagnosed and CPAP treated, the symptoms abated provided I get at least one CPAP treatment every three days. I choose nightly treatment just to be safe but CPAP is invasive to your bedmate. It was an accidental 14 day absence that led to AutoPilot saving me and my late wife the second month of Tesla ownership in 2019. Regardless, here is another example: I had seen similar behavior with Joe Biden. It is an under diagnosed syndrome that explains a lot of single car accidents (and some multi-car ones.) There are online questionnaires that help screening. Ask your search engine (or not) to find them. CPAP treatment works but only if diagnosed and treated. Bob Wilson
I feel that driving is a bit unnatural and it's forced on all of us, at least in countries like the USA. If driving were a hobby I'm sure there'd be a lot of people who wouldn't have started driving in the first place. Every day I see people make driving mistakes, mistakes that could lead to a deadly accident. The SUV craze seems to have also given people a bit of overconfidence too, so they're even less concentrated on driving safely. Autonomous driving might be the solution. If you can make every car drive itself better than the average driver then accidents should go down. I will say that I also enjoy public transportation when I'm in an area where it's good. We went down to the big city of Denver the other day. We took the light rail and a few buses all over Denver and its surrounding cities. For the most part it was nice, no traffic to deal with, no need to find a parking spot. Then, on the next day, we decided to take the car downtown. The next thing you know we were gridlocked into extremely slow traffic. We could have made it there and back on the light rail in half the time. And once downtown I dropped my wife off and spent the next half hour driving in circles looking for a place to park. I finally found one and of course it was paid parking. The nicest thing about public transportation is I can set my watch alarm to wake me up before my stop and then sleep all I want up to that point.
I remember when I was a little kid in the 70's and political leadership at the federal level was done by some of the smartest, most articulate people I learned about. Then the Reagan "revolution" moved in and every aspect of the government that served the common folk was attacked and gutted and we ended up with really old senile presidents who would fall asleep in cabinet meetings. And ever since, with the exception Obama and Clinton, we've been led by nepotistic village idiots who only serve as president to the extent it makes the rich richer and the poor poorer and their highest moral virtue is their ability to ignore the importance of their work so much that they're constantly falling asleep. If someone told me the USA didn't make it past 250 years I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Can't argue with that Back on topic... speaking as also on CPAP but much shorter duration 'in service': bit over a year now. Severe SA was how it was diagnosed and related to me by local med pros... and the difference on nightly CPAP is massive (diff. betw. waking up ready to go, and contemplating staying in bed). When off CPAP, get maybe 4.5 hrs useful sleep a night, dark circles under the eyes for decades; 6 used to be my normal until the last few yrs. No sleep buddy, of course (tho tbh, if your partner's wanting you off when your machine is one of the modern ResMeds? They need earplugs, not you off CPAP When off the plastic lung... the number of episodes I'm sat sedentary > few mins, drastically less. Used to nod regularly, so caffeine of course would pinch-hit (as far back as the '90s)... at least, for a while. Tolerance w/o imbibing until the jitters, meant the nods'd be back... and when driving, it's a showstopper -- literally, if you're time's up. Find zero actual subjective value to nodding off / microsleep say, waiting in the doc's ofc; seems more a natural imperative you lack input into, than a solution to lack of sleep. You never get it back, you just let the body catch up to damage control and waste sanitation after a while, provided good sleep all your 'recovery' days (for me, about 3 - 4 after an all-nighter like New Year's prep / ceremony at the temple)
Yeah... If you want to talk CPAP then we should talk about how its a brute force therapy that forces air past an obstruction. And rather than working on the problem (eliminating the obstruction) with physical therapy and the correct pillow and sleeping positions, they instead ignore the cause and treat the symptom. Classic problem in Western Medicine that's more interested in incentives to sell expensive medical equipment rather than incentives to treat the patient with better sleeping configurations, targeted physical therapy and more exercise, as well as eating a healthier diet.
