Fellow CPAP users: Do you
Luke, I am your father ...
check it or haul it through airport security?
I’m a CPAP newbie, in the middle of a road trip.
CPAP machine: oxygen mask that I wear so I don’t die in my sleep. A sleep study revealed that I stop breathing 42 times an hour, which is not good for my health. Wife study revealed that snoring woke her up at least one time an hour, which is not good for my marriage.
Looking and sounding like Darth Vader is goofy enough at home. But parading it through the airport is making me a bit self-conscious. Here’s the drill: take CPAP machine out of carry-on and out of its case so security can see it. Send it through x-ray so security can see inside it. Take it out of the x-ray machine and put it into some kind of sniffing machine. Having determined that it looks, x-rays and smells like a CPAP machine, it is verified as such and returned to me in mid-shoeing. Stuff CPAP back into carry-on, then gather laptop and any stray boxers that might have fallen out.
Having gone through this extravaganza three times in the last week, I’m thinking about checking the bag on the leg home. Help me out here, folks.
UPDATE: Having received advice from several Facebook pals, this is how I resolved it: I checked my undies and carried the CPAP onboard. This made for less stress through security. I don’t know why I get stressed in security — I think it’s my old Catholic guilt complex surfacing.
4 Comments
Unless you want to buy I new one, I’d stick with carry-on. It’s a fragile piece of machinery. Here’s a good way to decide: Would you check a laptop? If not, don’t check your cpap.
Unless you’d like to die in your sleep when the airline loses your checked baggage, I wouldn’t check it either. Get a bigger carry-on bag for your laptop and stick in that so you don’t have to spread your undies everywhere.
Better your undies show in the airport than in the morgue after they find you dead in your hotel room because you didn’t have the CPAP machine because the airline lost it.
Check the undies and carry on the CPAP. You can replace undies if they are sent to the wrong destination. Replacing CPAP, not so easy.