As someone with severe sleep apnea, I’ve considered adding it several times, but haven’t convinced myself it would be worth the effort to add.
In the cataclysm it would be loosely speaking untreatable, so you’d just sleep badly all the time. The symptom is you briefly stop breathing while sleeping briefly but regularly. In severe cases such as mine this happens up to dozens of times every minute. The lack of oxygen triggers a gasp reflex, which gets you breathing again, but also partially wakes you up. The end result is you never enter a deep sleep phase, you end up sleeping for much longer than usual, but you’re always tired. The resulting chronic fatigue has it’s own set of symptoms.
The only treatment is wearing a breathing mask while sleeping that provides positive air pressure that keeps your throat from closing, not only are these machines rare, but they also are going to eat through batteries like crazy. Using a CPAP continuously has its own set of symptoms, such as the unusually dry air damaging your airways and causing chronic infections, but that’s going too deep, even for DDA.
