My dad is a snorer. A robust Olympian of a snorer. The kind of snorer who can shake walls and summon earthquakes with his tracheal vibrations. For years I suffered through family vacations spent sleeping in the same room as my parents. As soon as dad would nod off — which never took long, as damn near everyone in my family is more or less narcoleptic — I knew that was all the wrote, and at best I’d get a couple of broken hours of sleep that night. I buried my face in pillows and shoved earplugs into my head and pitched unholy but silent fits at the injustice. I just couldn’t understand why Dad couldn’t just not<\/i> snore so I could sleep. It seemed so simple.<\/p>\n
Aaaaand then I grew up and into a snorer too. I didn’t even know it had happened until I moved in with my boyfriend in college and he got the pleasure of discovering it and letting me in on the secret. Except, truthfully or not, he told me he thought it was cute. So I always just sort of imagined that I cooed adorably in my sleep a little every now and again, and that my breath smelled of roses and my drool turned into diamonds when it hit the pillow. <\/p>\n
Since then I have had multiple people break the awful truth to me again and again: I am a snorer, and it’s not cute, and did I know I sometimes sound like I am going to die mid-slumber?<\/p>\n
You win this round of Lesson Learnedness, Universe.<\/p>\n
In the intervening years, Dad learned that he has sleep apnea, which is a cruel sleep disorder in which you are sleepy and tired all the time, but the time you spend sleeping is so choppy thanks to your inability to breathe properly that you don’t get any rest at all. Hence being tired all the time. He wakes up dozens of times an hour<\/i>, every hour, to try to regain his breath. The doctors put him on a CPAP machine years ago, and it took him a long time to get used to it, but it seems to be helping a bit. Since then, mom’s gotten diagnosed with sleep apnea too. And Grandmaw. The snoring scourge has been somewhat tamed by large, expensive, unsexy apparatuses that are not unlike nighttime gas masks. My (very brief, very digital) research leads me to believe that sleep apnea\/snoring is at least partly inherited, and exacerbated by things like being overweight and a fondness for cheese and booze. OH HOORAY.<\/p>\n
Recently I have been feeling real sheepish about my snoring problem. See, there is this guy I’ve taken a real strong shine to who occasionally finds himself in my house overnight, and he very often has to get up early for work. My bedroom is quiet — perhaps too quiet — so any rattly peep I make is amplified, causing this guy to lose precious minutes of REM time. I have told him to just nudge me or move my head when I start snoring and I’ll stop. This is mostly true. But I can’t ask him to be the snore police all night. Which is why when I felt him nudge me in the wee hours of this morning, I just moseyed on out of the bedroom and took to the couch. It was a blow to my ego — I mean, I’m still trying to impress this guy, not make him lie awake, cursing my existence — but I’d much rather feel a little embarrassed than lie there and ruin his entire night and the entire next heavy-eyed day.<\/p>\n
So obviously I need some kind of soothing, noisemaking something-or-other in the bedroom that will help offset the noise I make. (Frankly, I miss my old apartment’s rumbly loud window AC unit, which did double duty as a cat-mewling masker.) But then what? Lose weight? Liposuction my neck fat? Tracheotomy (Nick’s suggestion)? Give in and go to a sleep clinic and see just how bad my problem is? Ugh. I really don’t even want to know how bad it is, and I’m too stubborn to give in to the CPAP right now, despite how it will probably fix all my problems and cure futurecancer too.<\/p>\n
But I really don’t want to run that very sweet man out of my bed either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My dad is a snorer. A robust Olympian of a snorer. The kind of snorer who can shake walls and summon earthquakes with his tracheal vibrations. For years I suffered through family vacations spent sleeping in the same room as my parents. As soon as dad would nod off — which never took long, as damn near everyone in my family is more or less narcoleptic — I knew that was all the wrote, and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[85,1477],"tags":[1468,2186,2249,1485,1486],"class_list":["post-4016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-family","category-the-manfriend","tag-manfriend","tag-relationships","tag-sleep","tag-sleep-apnea","tag-snoring"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-12M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4016"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4018,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4016\/revisions\/4018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}