Back story: I irresponsibly slept for 2-3 weeks. Racking up a sleep debt of sometimes 4 hours per night. So by the time that I decided to reset my schedule I was about 24 hours+ in sleep debt. Needless to say I used this exact method, I didn't eat for 16 hours before, and I had to get up a 7 so I stopped eating around 3PM. This was a bad idea, I didn't have a very filling lunch, and after a while if you've done this before you note that not eating makes you very very very sleepy. I left work around 5:15. I fell asleep around 5:30, unfortunately I was still driving at the time. The car veered into the oncomming lane (it was empty) and went up the curb, on which was a small hill. I was still asleep when this happened, and then the car went up so far it couldn't sustain, and it flipped back into my lane (this happened at 40-50 MPH). Needless to say I awoke scared shitless as I was plummeting towards the ground and my airbags were deploying.
I escaped the accident with just some cuts on my hand from the shattered glass from the side windows. My car was totaled. The officer who came on site gave me a 200$ ticket. My father took me to the hospital, where I was given a CAT scan and everything checked out fine. However I had no way of getting to work. The car wasn't worth much it was an 11 year old Ford Escort Coup. Blue book value was around $4,000. The moral of the story is, be thankful for what you have, sleep responsibly and take care of yourself.
The accident was last Monday.
Glad you are ok. Obviously this is a great lesson to anyone - if you are sleepy don't drive.
Don't worry about the car and the fine, I'm happy that the CAT scan showed no lasting damage and that in the end this is hopefully just a material thing, nothing affecting your health.
And please go a bit easier on your body, sleep deprivation is a great way to harm yourself permanently. Your body really needs that sleep and to push yourself past what is good for you is not something that you can equate with a 'couple of hours of sleep debt', it can harm you on a much longer timescale as well, even if you don't get into car accidents because of it.
I have become a frequent face at a local hotel because I was so tired I did not trust myself to do that. (The project at issue is mostly done. Thank God.)
(Quick sidenote: Five minutes before checking into the hotel to avoid killing myself walking down the street, I was being paid time-and-a-half because my workplace apparently thought that my presence was adding value. Some of you people reading this will eventually be engineering managers. If you ever are, prior to ordering Heroic Efforts (TM), please consider whether you really want me working on a production system in that state.)
I am going to give it a try too; but we won't know if it has worked for 2 days. Tomorrow(Tuesday EST) you'll wake up and eat, and that is the trigger to alter your sleep schedule. If you wake up naturally the following day (Wednesday EST) you'll know it worked.