An Apneic Abroad

Let me tell you my own experiences . . .

Nine years ago--during my first year of living with CPAP--I took my machine along on a trip to France. I had a professional conference to attend at Nice, in the south of France, but planned to drive there and back from Paris--a round trip of several hundred miles.

I had expected a companion, but at the last moment I found myself travelling alone.

The first night, nursing my self-pity in a romantic castle-hotel, I relaxed back to the soothing purr of my faithful companion machine. Then it, too, betrayed me.

In a moment, it stopped.

My efforts failed to arouse it from its coma.

I had only a vague notion that something electrical had gone wrong--but I blamed it on the string of connectors I had attached to make the machine's plug compatible with a foreign socket.

For the rest of the trip, I carried what I thought to be the offending connector with me, from town to city, asking in my broken French whether it could be replaced. Alas, no one seemed to recognize this piece of rubber and metal. Never did it occur to me that the problem might lie in something else--perhaps easily replaceable, even in France.

Predictably, I slept poorly that trip, often awaking choking and gasping, spending a lot of the day in bed and little at the conference. While driving, I had to stop every hour or two for a half-hour nap that seemed unavoidable, though the naps didn't do much good.

Only after returning to the states did I learn that I had blown a fuse. This happened because I had also failed to turn a little dial on the back to compensate for the difference in electric current between France and the U.S.

Thinking to have solved my problems at last, I asked my home care service for both a new and a spare pair of fuses. Thereafter I carried them with me whenever I travelled, but never needed to use them, until . .

Just recently, I visited the Azores, a group of small islands in the Atlantic, far removed from both America and Europe. They are considered part of Europe, and therefore use European voltage-- 220 volts instead of the 110 volts used in the USA.

Unfortunately, I forgot about the little dial on the back that shifted

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