Sleep Deprivation Experiences

[Greg Davenport]

Clayton,

What did the nurse look like? Perhaps you should have pretended to be asleep

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Greg Davenport
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[Javahed]

All this talk about marathon drives has me concerened. My opinion is that driving while excessivly drowsy is just as bad ad driving while drunk.

NHTSA & NCSDR Program to Combat Drowsy Driving
Report to the House and Senate Appropriations Committees
NHTSA data indicate that in recent years there have been about 56,000 crashes annually in which driver drowsiness/fatigue was cited by police. An annual average of roughly 40,000 nonfatal injuries and 1,550 fatalities result from these crashes. It is widely recognized that these statistics under report the extent of these types of crashes.
The report says that a typical crash related to sleepiness has the following characteristics:

the problem occurs during late night/early morning or late afternoon
the crash is likely to be serious
the crash usually involves a single vehicle leaving a high-speed road
the driver makes no attempt to avoid the crash and is usually alone in the vehicle.
"As soon as a driver becomes sleepy, the key behavioral step is to stop driving—for example, letting a passenger drive or stopping to sleep before continuing a trip" the report says. "Two remedial actions can make a short-term difference in driving alertness: taking a short nap (about 15 to 20 minutes) and consuming caffeine equivalent to two cups of coffee. The effectiveness of any other steps to improve alertness when sleepy, such as opening a window or listening to the radio, has not been demonstrated.

And yes, I've awakened to my car cruising across a field, tracking away from the highway I was driving on moments before, mai-dee mahk mahk

Dan

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Go Get 'em Gear

[This message has been edited by Javahed (edited 12-13-2000).]

 

[CH]

Greg, nurse in question no doubt carried me in the ER herself

. As a side note she may have had 4 teeth and 2 inches between her nose and chin.

Regards, Clayton

 

[CAman]

Tejas,
What Fraternity were you? I was also greek in California.

 

[Bronco]

Clayton,
Talk about your rude awakenings.

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Semper Fi

-Bill

 

[TheMartialWay]

Sesoku,

This question was brought up by myself a while back. http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/001042.html

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Louis Buccellato
http://www.themartialway.com
Knives, Weapons and equipment. Best prices anywhere.
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"only the paranoid will survive"

 

[Ralf]

I remember reading an article recently about a mid aged guy with sleeping problems. He walked up to the hospital claming he hadn't slept for months! The doctors where skeptical and checked him out. His claim was the truth!!! The maximum he slept was an intermittent total of 30min a night. After many checks they found out that he had had an infection which got – so he thought - treated successfully with antibiotics. The problem was, some of the bacteria had traveled along his spine into a part of his brain where they could survive, because oral antibiotics don’t go there easily. This specific part of the brain was controlling the sleeping habits and got completely disabled. When they killed those bacteria with shots, he went back to almost normal sleeping of 6 hrs a night.

Interesting the results of this sleeplessness. While his mental abilities were quite diminished (he tried to make a phone call from the hospital on a public pay phone without coins and couldn’t figure out how to use it properly) his physical functions were all normal! The result of this study is that the body can actually live without any sleep at all. Only the brain needs the rest to reorganize and structure the impressions it got during the day. In short, you won’t die from not sleeping.

 

[Greg Covington]

I was in Palm Beach last month without any sleep for days.........I think I voted for Gore.

 

[Stryver]

Sleep is a blessed thing... I've seen somewhere in the vicinity of 40 hours awake several times, and I've always done it with the benefit of caffeine. But then, I just like coffee...

My personal experience is that the amount of sleep you've had, on average, over the past week or so will greatly influence how you function without sleep. When I was sleeping 4 - 5 hours a night, skipping a nights sleep would have me mentally toast by midday. Getting seven hours of sleep on average, and I could completely skip a night and have no problems.

Caffeine has some interesting effects on one. Physiologically, it doesn't actually 'wake' you up, it's effect on your brain is to prevent the buildup of the stuff that makes you feel tired. The 'awake' part of it will affect you for a few hours, but it will elevate your heart rate, blood pressure and contract blood vessels for a day or more afterwards. Caffeine is acidic, and will act on your GI tract in large quantities like any other acid. Coffee or tea compounds this with added tannins and other things. This leads to diahhrea in large quantities. The headache common in coming down off a caffeine high may be occasionally attributed to dehydration, caffeine is a diuretic, but it also can be physically attributed to the effects of caffeine itself. After a while of your blood vessels being contracted, when you stop caffeine intake they dilate. This increases pressure in your brain, and will frequently give you a headache.

In extremely high doses, caffeine will cause tremors, heartbeat oddities and nervousness. The LD50 for caffeine is the equivalent of somewhere in the vicinity of 150 cups of coffee, and the likelihood is that you would have physiological problems from the substance the caffeine was in before the actual caffeine killed you. Other useless trivia, the Navy deems an inappropriate coffee habit to be more than about 4 cups a day.

Stryver, keeper of useless information