Dehydration Revisited

Remember at the beginning of the month how I wrote about getting stopped by a cop who said my driving was so weavy he thought I was drunk at nine in  the morning? Yeah. I talked about how it turned out to be dehydration. I didn't get a ticket, but I knew the cop was correct. I did not need to be driving. As soon as I could, I stopped the car and let my roommate drive for the rest of the morning.

Come to find out, this wasn't my only bit of screwed up judgment that day. This morning I opened my bank statement and noticed that my account had far more money in it than it should have.  The equivalent of my rent in too much money. I knew I got my rent money out of the account, but somehow, there it was. A home call to my landlord and a careful review of deposit slips later, and I realized that instead of depositing my rent money into my landlord's account, I had put it back into mine. I have no idea how I accomplished this.

The sad fact is, I don't even remember doing it. I have absolutely no memory of anything that happened that morning past getting into the passenger's seat.  That's how screwed up my system was. To be honest, I am lucky nothing happened while I was driving.

I think sometimes we focus too much on the 'don't drink and drive' message. Don't get me wrong. I know it's very important. However, I think we are giving people the wrong impression when we just emphasize the alcohol part of the problem. We should never drive when we have any kind of impairment. If we are too dehydrated, too tired, too sick, too emotional, too focused on something else, or having a fit of sneezes, we should not be driving. Our judgment is off and we could cause problems.

I will admit I've been guilty of this and not just with this last situation. When I was having a lot of sleep apnea problems during grad school, I would take off for my hour and half commute four hours before I needed to be there. I would drive until I just couldn't handle it anymore and I would stop and sleep for a while. This sounds  kind of marginally responsible, but it really wasn't. I would wait until I was in so much pain from lack of sleep that I had no choice. I should have been sleeping quite a while before that.  I was driving through windy, twisty roads too. It really scares me to think of what could have happened.

This has been a big lesson for me. I really need to start making sure that if  I'm going to be behind the wheel, I am as awake and as healthy as I can be. If I need some more time to wake up, I need to take it. If I need some more time to get more water in my system, then I need to take it. And if I don't have the time to do these things, then I have no business driving.