busybee fluffy rambles

After the first few days with the ring I was finding my sleep to be pretty awful, and I was noticing that I was waking up quite frequently. Some of it seems to be due to apnea coming and going, but last night while just lying in bed totally awake I started getting “please move” vibrations even though I was definitely breathing, and the ring said my SpO₂ was a perfectly-healthy 98%.

But! My heart rate was dropping under 45, which was the configured notification for that.

Today I had to run an errand in Burien, so I got to try the Leaf in somewhat-more-chaotic driving conditions than what I did during my test drive yesterday.

So Carvana arrived today, and delivered my new car and took my old car away. The whole process was really straightforward and simple, and of course they gave me time to do a test drive before committing to the exchange. It was kind of sad to see my Mazda3 go away but I’m sure whoever ends up with it next will make much better use of it than I did.

Anyway! So now I have a shiny black vehicle from the future. It is really fun to drive, but also very different. It’s so weird to turn it on and to not hear an engine rev. It’s weird not having an engine to rev. It moves smoothly. One-pedal mode feels like how driving should have always been, and supposedly it’s better at power consumption so I will probably be using it a lot, at least for my city driving.

I’ve had my current car, a Mazda3, for nearly 6 years. It’s a great car. I like it a lot.

But, there’s a few things I’ve gotten somewhat fed up with on it:

• It doesn’t have all the safety features I want (especially lane departure notifications and collision avoidance)
• It costs a lot to maintain given how little I drive it
• Its cargo space isn’t very flexible (since I have the sedan version)

For a while I’ve been thinking about getting an electric vehicle, and recently I got the idea planted in my head that it would be worth switching to a Nissan Leaf.

Anyway, on Carvana, I found a 2018 Leaf SL with all of the safety features I want, and also it still has around 135 miles of range (supposedly) and its battery is still well under warranty, and the cost was only a little bit more than what Carvana said the trade-in value on my Mazda3 was.

So maybe a bit impulsively, I bought it. It will arrive on Friday.

My cost after trade-in is around $1000, and it only raises my insurance premiums by around $8/month. So, yay.

I’ve always had issues where I’ll stop breathing in the middle of the night, but I don’t snore. Sometimes I wake up gasping for air. I’ve suspected central sleep apnea for a long time.

Several years ago I had an in-home sleep study, where they hooked up an SpO₂ meter to me and recorded it overnight. There were a number of drops throughout the night, indicative of apnea in general, and as a result I was provided a CPAP machine (on the assumption that it was obstructive, rather than central, apnea).

The CPAP machine didn’t really help much (if at all) and I kept trying to make it work over the next few years. Then due to a change in insurance I needed to get another study to get authorized for continuing the prescription, and they said that the CPAP machine wasn’t helpful for whatever my sleep issue was. I ended up selling it on the used market.

But I was still having apnea issues, and a lack of restful sleep.

Over the past few weeks it’s gotten especially bad, and after someone was evangelizing the Oura ring, I looked into continuous monitoring solutions. I’ve had a cheap finger monitor for years, which has been helpful for spot-checking but is uncomfortable to wear to bed, and also doesn’t record a log, making it less useful for diagnosing issues.

Oura is pretty expensive (and now requires a $6/month subscription plan) and doesn’t do continuous SpO₂ monitoring (it only does momentary checks, similar to the current Apple Watch), but perusing other reviews and half-remembering a few videos I’d seen years ago, I eventually came across the Wellue O2ring, which is a continuous monitor which logs SpO₂, heart rate, and movement all night long, and can also send a little vibration to your finger whenever the SpO₂ drops below a configurable threshold.