Apparently they’re going to make a thing of this.
Fox “News” you say? Well of course. Any chance they get to say something negativey or scary about a non-Republican president, they’re gonna go for it. But it’s not just Fox:
- CNN: Biden’s sleep apnea: What is it and how is it treated?
- CBS: Biden using CPAP machine to address sleep apnea
- NPR: Biden’s sleep apnea has led him to use a CPAP machine at night
- USA Today: Joe Biden is using a CPAP machine to deal with sleep apnea
… and Reuters. The New York Times. Al Jazeera. People. The Arizona Republic. It’s huge news! Feeble old man could keel over dead any minute now!
Looking at “the Five” on that Fox News screen cap, above, I spot at least one probable CPAP user, the laughing hypocrite on the right. Very likely one of the women too, I’m thinking the one in red but who knows.
AFAIC it’s remarkable Joe Biden made it all the way to 80 before starting to use a CPAP machine. I started using one 20 years ago, in my 50s. I learned, talking with my doctor and specialists at the sleep clinic where they diagnosed my sleep apnea, that people who suffer from the condition have it all their lives but that its effects begin to seriously hit in middle age, and that fits with my experience. When I was young the lack of sleep didn’t affect me so much but when I got into my 50s it did. I started nodding off during the day and on the job, most frighteningly while driving.
The most common treatment for obstructive sleep apnea is continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy: wearing a mask connected to a machine that supplies air under pressure while you sleep, stopping the constant cycle of snoring, snorting, waking up, snoring, snorting, etc. I use a CPAP. My wife uses a CPAP. Lots and lots of people do, almost all of them decades younger than Joe Biden.
I don’t know how many of my friends and neighbors use CPAP machines to help them sleep. It’s not the sort of thing we talk about with one another. Obstructive sleep apnea is a fairly common condition, yet we tend to treat it as an unmentionable. You don’t see CPAP machines on nightstands in the fancy bedrooms they show in magazine or television ads, any more than you see toilet plungers in those ass-wiping bear ads.
I remember the first (and so far only) time I saw someone use a CPAP machine on TV: it was on a show called Goliath which streamed on Amazon a couple of years ago. I stood up and cheered when Billy Bob Thornton put that mask on and went to sleep. Validation!
Well, hey, more validation. An American president uses a CPAP, just like me! Yay!
And fuck you, news industry, for framing it as a political scandal, a hit on Joe Biden. You know goddamn well Trump uses one — and wears adult diapers as well — but you never say a peep about that.
I can already see the coming fascist GQP political attack ads: Joe Biden as played by Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, sucking down some kind of vile drug through an inhalation mask ‘Don’t fucking look at me!’
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Now that is a scary image. I watched Blue Velvet at home with my wife and a mutual ladyfriend and had to absent myself halfway through. Dennis Hopper was making me stabby.
And another goddamn thing … are we seeing the death of title case? Every example of Biden CPAP news I ferreted out on Google this morning is headlined in sentence case, just as shown. Not “Biden Using CPAP Machine to Address Sleep Apnea” but “Biden using CPAP machine to address sleep apnea.” Bloomberg, The New York Times, and Forbes (among a few others) still use title case in headlines but most news publications (including the Washington Post) use sentence case. Most style guides still call for title case in headlines, but the rules for title case differ. I mostly go by AP, but when it comes to blog post titles, Chicago. That’s how I type ’em, anyway. Damn WordPress turns ’em into all caps.
It is sheer laziness and being rushed. You need to turn on caps lock and then turn it off again; or else tap uppercase before each capital letter. It’s the same reason colons and semicolons are dying off, you need to press and hold ‘v’ or ‘b’ to make them and who has time for that?
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Any word on the implanted “Inspire” product? Would there be any crossover with teevee remote? Come to think of it, that could be a genius connection, My experience with CPAP mask wasn’t so great, couldn’t sleep with it.