Apnea, Schnapnea
Maybe I should just die in my sleep and not worry about things. That would be simpler.
I have sleep apnea, which means that I, like many other people, are skilled at two things:
Snoring so loudly that I register on the Richter scale, the next state over
Trying hundreds of times each night to reach the next life by depriving myself of oxygen in this one
I’ve had this condition for too many years. Actually, if you have a partner in your life, a few days or a week, tops, is too many years.
The way you know you have this condition is really simple:
During the day, you fall asleep as soon as you stop doing anything, like driving, talking, chewing, or reading
You are so sleep deprived and befuddled that you deny you have a problem, even though you fall asleep during your own denial
Fortunately, there is a treatment for this condition that isn’t CPAP, because CPAP was evidently invented by someone in the heating and cooling industry, given that it involves hooking up a hose to your body and filling you full of air despite your fatalist tendency to not want to do this. I can’t help but wonder what the beta versions were like, and how many people woke up looking like blimps because the pressure was just too high.
Oh, and if you don’t clean your CPAP apparatus, you’re faced with the prospect of inhaling deep into your lungs a brew of bacteria that should scare the bejeebers out of you. I guess that (even so) this must be preferable to inhaling flies, grasshoppers, and nearby small mammals (or your cat), if you snore the way I do.
The treatment I have settled on is called an oral appliance, which makes it sound vaguely like something I should pick up in a sex shop.
The trick of this little beauty is to gently pull your jaw forward so that air can find its way to your lungs, and it really does work. You can try this yourself by thrusting your lower jaw forward (don’t get overly enthusiastic, now – you don’t want to sprain your head), and it should make you breathe more easily. If you’re a guy, it will also allow you to talk like a geezer. You can try that as well. I might add, both of these little experiments are best done when no one is watching.
The oral appliance consists of two parts that are molded to your teeth. The upper part looks fairly normal. And the lower part has two upthrust points that look like incisors borrowed from a saber-toothed tiger and turned upside down. It’s fortunate that you have the upper plate, or these things would go through the top of your head when you closed your mouth.
The whole point of all this is that the saber-toothed parts engage the upper part and keep your lower jaw in a forward position.
You sleep with this in your face. Before sleeping, you can entertain people by answering their questions: “What are you doing tomorrow?” “I thud twy to do thum exthurthithing.”
It isn’t all that difficult to sleep, actually, after the first few nights where you simply drop off from exhaustion (or exthauthtyun). And your sleep really does improve quite a bit. You begin dreaming once again, so well that you make all kinds of new and bizarre friends in dreamland. And, lo! You stay awake when you are supposed to.
So all goes well, and then you go in for your annual checkup.
I don’t remember that much about checkup number one, other than that I came away with a vague impression that my doctor might actually be a little bit on the unusual side.
The second visit, now. This is worth a story.
First, I had to change the appointment (at a respectable 10am) to a new date, for personal reasons. My new appointment, pushed out about two weeks, was at 8am. This required me to spend the better part of an hour driving in rush hour traffic to a town about 20 miles away, which is where the specialists have their office.
In I go, and I’m soon whisked to a room and settled into that marvel of ingenuity, the dentist chair. What I hadn’t noticed the last time was that these chairs are positioned with their backs to the exam room door, a sort of open-office plan for dentistry that allows people to glide in and out, make faces, hold up two fingers behind your head like devil’s horns, and so forth, without you having the slightest clue what they’re doing.
I have my blood pressure taken. My systolic is high. I comment on this, and the dental assistant (or apnea assistant, I guess) says, “It’s probably because you’re in a dentist’s office.” I reason that it might have to do with the hockey game I was playing with eighteen-wheelers on the highway, my car being the puck, but decide to let it go.
All goes well with the up-front part of the exam. Then the assistant says, “OK, I’ll just go get Dr. Whoozit.” (Not his real name – duh, you figured that out all on your own).
She disappears, which isn’t completely accurate, because she never was much in my field of vision, chair position and all.
Silence.
More silence, long enough for me to realize that I hadn’t used the restroom since before my long drive, and my bladder was letting me know it didn’t appreciate this. Also long enough for me to browse on Google Play, download an App on my phone, try it out, and conclude it was worthless.
I’m still fiddling with it when I feel the Presence. The sorcerer’s apprentice is back, and Dr. Whoozit has glided up behind me, like some apparition from the deep shadows of apnea-free dreams.
Here I have to mention that Dr. Whoozit looks disconcertingly like the Walrus from Alice in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass. Sandy hair, walrus moustache, eyes that look like he might weep over the fate of the oysters he’s consuming. He gives a sad, shy greeting, and then pushes a button on the chair which causes it to straighten, levitate, wrinkle, and then sink into the depths of the room, me with my head lower than my feet.
Now, if you have apnea, this is a singularly uncomfortable position for you to find yourself in. Dr. Walrus calls this the “sleep position,” from which I deduce that this man must never sleep. It is also, curiously, a position that apparently flattens your bladder (or, in my case, attempts to), pushing all your trapped waste back up through your piping, resulting in additional gut discomfort and making me wonder if I’ll leak all over their pristine examining room.
Dr. Walrus now begins his examination, which alternates between providing what I assume is useful numerical data about the status of my oral appliance / sex toy, while occasionally bemoaning the sad state of affairs of the human race in general.
I remember that my wife asked me to ask the good doctor whether there is any rhyme or reason as to when snoring appears in the sleep cycle. The Walrus responds with a combination of things that must be connected somewhere in his mind, ranging everywhere from the food choices we have in supermarkets, to the rise of the global middle class, to how REM sleep may or may not be significant, and on and on. I think (when my bladder lets me) that somewhere in all of this is an answer, but for the life of me I can’t locate it.
I then realize that this position provides me with an incredible view of the nostrils of Dr. Walrus. Now, I don’t know about you, but one of the things I dread the most in life is being in that uncomfortable situation of looking up someone else’s nose. I don’t even like looking up my own nose. There is a reason why noses are shaped so that nostrils are generally hidden. This is, after all, a part of our anatomy whose intake function is vital, but whose exit functions (particularly the forceful ones) are best left alone.
Now I’m forced, as I try to thrash through the verbal wreckage of Walrus’s “answer,” to behold the hirsute glory of his breathing apparatus.
I admit at this point that I gently panic. It may well be that I suffer from what I hope is not an uncommon fear, which I’ll label “boogerophopia,” or fear of discovering someone else’s boogers. I suppose it could also be called “upsnotophopia,” but perhaps in mixed company it might best be referred to as “nasalhairophobia.” Whatever we call it, my boogerophobia causes me visually to cast about wildly for anything else to look at. Whatever Walrus is saying now is secondary to my attempts to find something, anything else, to look at. I’m spraining my eyes.
And something worse. Boogerophobia must cause in humans the fear that perhaps what you’re trying to avoid seeing is somehow present in your own nostrils. You therefore reach up and…
Sure enough, there’s one perched on the edge of my right nostril, like a sailor sniffing the wind. Of course, when you put your hand to your nose, the reaction of those watching you is to follow your hand motion. Which means that both the Walrus and his apprentice have likely discovered the shame of my own booger carelessness.
The horror! The horror!
This must be “anteboogerophobia,”(1) or fear-that-someone-will-discover-the-booger-in-your-own-nose. And it is very powerful, I can tell you. Because while my brain is screaming (silently) at my hand to PLEASE STOP REACHING THERE!, my hand will not obey. Or, perversely, it begins this process of obeying and disobeying, which must look as though my arm is a marionette, with someone in the hallway (remember the chair position) pulling the string.
I think that anteboogerophobia is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Because once you discover a “hanging beauty,” you will drop everything to take care of it. I’m convinced that anteboogerophobia has stopped filibusters in their tracks, changed the course of critical negotiations, is the hidden cause of spilled hot coffee lawsuits, and may even be responsible for some of the stranger “foreign policy by tweet” events of recent memory.
So there I am, hand flailing, nose pulsing, bladder squalling, trying to understand what the Walrus is saying, this time something to do with the frontiers of space, cars as tanks, and dystopic futures. I conclude that I am a nervous breakdown wrapped in a human shell, while he is something of a genius and a wacko, an artistic humanities type enthralled with a notion of the future so visionary that only he can comprehend it, striving to explain things but creating instead a pointillistic philosophy that spews forth and splashes onto his trapped, inverted, arm-flailing, booger-bound and nearly incontinent patient, who nonetheless will be added to the Walrus’s save-the-world mailing list, to share in his zany Weltschmerz going forward.
Otherwise, the visit went just fine.
Oh, and in the middle of this latest rambling Walrus pontification, the apprentice butted in with something that was actually related to the appointment – whereupon, in mid-word, Dr. Walrus deflated himself like a bizarre balloon and disappeared, not to be seen again for the rest of my stay.
Except, of course, he now appears in my email, bobbing on my mental horizon like some distant reminder of what I went through.
Or perhaps this was just a dream?
But no. Dreams don’t have extended hockey games with eighteen-wheelers in them. And there’s also what the apprentice sent me home with: a sleep study kit which, once I had attached it to myself that night, made me feel as though I had a plastic hamster lying on my chest all night, with strings and tubes snaking from it to various parts of my body. I suppose the study will prove either that my sleep has improved, or that no one sleeps well when wired every which way like a TV(2) or home entertainment system.
Then again, home entertainment is just what I may have provided them, they who cruelly and remotely monitored my overnight experience.
All in the name of science. And Boogerology.
___________________________________________________________________
(1) Some would argue that “anteboogerophobia” is the wrong term, that it should be “antiboogerophia.” They are mistaken. Antiboogerophobia would actually act against boogerophobia, meaning someone who is confident in being able to look up other people’s noses and discover whatever comes their way. Representatives here include dentists, otorhinolaryngologists (a word I can’t even say, much less spell), and morticians. These are confident booger discoverers, or at the very least, booger disregarders. Anteboogerophobia means the phobia that comes before your normal boogerophobia; in other words, you must be paranoid about the public discovery of your own boogers before you are paranoid about discovering anyone else’s.
A third school would argue that the order is not important, giving rise to, oh, I don’t know, quidproquoboogerophobia or some such term. But by now you no doubt agree that this whole footnote has been a complete waste of time.
(2) "...wired every which way like a TV." Borrowed from a lovely poem by W.D. Snodgrass, called "Planting a Magnolia." This is actually somewhat sad. When I looked the poem up online, it was made all the more precious to me by its nonexistence. The search engines seem not to know it ever lived. Thus ever to obscurity. So I'm relying on my Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, and, while I'd love to share the poem in its entirety, it would likely bore you. So I'll just provide this snippet, to keep this creation from vanishing altogether:
"...Our own magnolia tree.
We settle it, easy, into a sort of grave,
Slice down the root clump and trample in
Ripe leaf rot and the mellowed topsoil of its last field.
We wire it, each way, like a TV
And have installed this
Thing more ancient than our shorelines."
So there. Now you know how my apnea-addled brain makes its strange connections.
