Snore and You Sleep Alone

What is the greatest scourge known to mankind today? No, it's not the common cold. We have given up on the common cold except as source of revenue for manufacturers of sneezing, coughing, runny nose, fever and malaise medications. Long after even the cockroaches have departed this earth, the common cold will still be with us, defying nuclear holocaust, Armageddon, and black holes to eradicate it.

The scourge I refer to is snoring, the cause of more marital discord than indiscriminate channel-changing or wrong-end-of-the-toothpaste-squeezing. Snoring has sold more twin beds and peopled more two-bedroom homes than has ever been recorded.

At night, I lie in my customary fetal position, blankie drawn up snugly about my ears, thinking about a terrific idea I have for a comic strip featuring an engineering nerd and his pet dog. The nerd's loftiest ambition is to survive his mind-numbing life in a cubicle, while his dog is busy trying to take over the world by posing as a business consultant. I am considering the money-making possibilities of this when I receive a sharp poke between the shoulder blades.

"Stop snoring!" my helpmate demands.

"Snoring? Who's snoring? I'm wide awake," I point out.

"You're snoring," she insists. I deny even the possibility of this and return to my meditations only to receive, two minutes later, another blow, considerably sharper than the first. This tableau has become a nocturnal ritual, leaving me with enough contusions to qualify for abused spouse protection.

I decided to do some research on snoring to buttress my position. Centuries ago, it seems, snoring was thought to be the result of demons within the skull trying to get out at night. To test the validity of this theory, snorers frequently had their skulls clove by dedicated researchers; and, sure enough, the snoring stopped as the demons escaped.

More recent studies have shown that snoring is the direct result of breathing; and scientists discovered that if you could stop a snorer from breathing long enough, the problem would disappear. Also disappearing is the stereotype of the typical snorer: a man (women do not snore as they do not sweat as they do not grow hair in their ears) lies flat on his back, mouth open, from which arises a line of little "z's" terminating in a balloon containing a log being cut by a saw. The descriptive words for this act look something like "snor-r-f," "bla-a-ff." and sometimes "y-o-on-n-k."

Meet the new breed of snorer. Contrary to the stereotype, I can demonstrate the ability to snore while lying on my side, mouth clenched shut while thinking that I am wide awake. If I apparently can't distinguish between being awake or asleep, I may have a problem more serious than just snoring. Besides my sounding like an International Harvester during the height of the season, my bride claims that occasionally I go for long minutes without breathing at all, followed by an explosive snort to make up for lost time.

My research shows this to be a phenomenon known as sleep apnea that is considered by students of sleeping disorders to be a serious problem. Having always been the type of person who will face his problems whenever there appears to be no other way out, I have sent away for a device known as an oral proprioceptive stimulator. This is a plastic appliance to be worn in the palate at night and resembles a flipper without teeth, but with a movable flap at the distal of the soft palate that pushes the base of the tongue down while the wearer attempts to keep his dinner down.

The theory behind its operation is something I don't have time to understand, nor the capacity to do so. I bought it as an antisnoring machine; and although the jury is still out, I think the portents are good. My wife says she thinks it may be working. She came in from the other room and woke me up to tell me this. I was pleased, as you can imagine I would be, to be awakened at 2 a.m. with this kind of information. As it turns out, being aroused periodically is not a bad idea if you wish to avoid one other nocturnal problem, that of drowning in your sleep. My salivary glands, which seem to be the last of my glands to show the ravages of time, are producing upwards of 50 gallons of saliva every night in a frantic effort to wash out the appliance before morning.

I think young people who are out tomcatting around all night when they have the natural ability to sleep straight through from 10:30 p.m. until 9 a.m., would do well to listen to the laments of their elders who can never remember having had this blessing once. Grab as many zeds as you can while you're young, kids, there will be plenty of time at night later to consider other pursuits like wondering if there is any Alka-Seltzer in the cabinet or trying to determine what time the luminous dial on the clock says without finding your glasses first.