My little secret

I have a little confession--something that some of you may know, while others do not.  I have a condition known as sleep apnea.  Basically what happens when you have this condition is that you.....uh....well, sort of stop breathing in the middle of the night while your sleeping.  Those people who have a severe type of apnea can have it happen many times during the night.  You basically stop breathing....and then your brain will send a signal to your heart to get its shit together and give it a kickstart.
Needless to say, when you have a condition like this, it generally means that you're not getting a lot of quality sleep.  This can lead to all sort of complications down the road--like a feeling of being tired, drowiness and all sort of nasty things.  You know, like heart attacks while you sleep.  There are some who believe that the former NFL great Reggie White's apnea was one of the causes of his fatal heart attack at an early age a few months ago.
I think I began to show the symptoms of apnea during the middle part of my 2nd marriage.  I had began to put on a pretty good amount of weight (its not like there was a lot else to do--ahem) and the beloved former Mrs Me # 2 began to complain about---well---my snoring.  She would often end up going out to the living room to sleep on the couch in the middle of the night.  Eventually, she persuaded me to go and get a sleep study.  Unfortunately, the sleep study happened to coincided with the end of our marriage--so it didn't seem like it was as big a deal to me at that point.
Besides that,  I had lost some weight (divorce can do that to you) and decided in my own mind that if I snored, I wasn't going to have anyone around to nag me about it.
Smart thinking.  My parents came to visit me one weekend (a stunner, no doubt) and I spent a night in the suite they were in.  My father told me the next morning that he was concerned because he had thought he heard me stop breathing a few times.
I sort of thought this was an obvious example of the pot calling the kettle black, since I can easily recall growing up listening to my father do his impression of Foghorn Leghorn every night while he slept.  So I kept ignoring the warning signs (I have a tendency to do that in regards to a lot of things.  Its not one of my better traits) and proceeded on, trying to ignore the CPAC machine that was situated at the foot of my bed.  The CPAC machine is a device that the apnea sufferer uses that basically helps force oxygen in through your mouth and nose--essentially forcing your heart to take the oxygen whether it wants it or not.
More time went by and eventually I met someone.  She invited me to sleep over at her house and I began to actually scramble for reasons NOT to stay over, knowing about my condition but being too ashamed to tell her.  Finally one night I did stay over, and---no surprise here--in the morning she was on the couch.  A few weeks later we went on a cruise together....we had a wonderful time.  I was convinced that I had unbelieveably found someone else that I not only could make a part of my life, but make a permanent part of my life.  We had our differences in certain things, but I was so in love with her that I convinced myself that they could be worked around.
Then the final night of the cruise came....and about 2:30am I woke up and found her sitting there in the dark, crying.  I asked her what was wrong and she told me that I was snoring so loud that she couldn't sleep.  I'm sure it sounds like a comical situation.  I'm sure if I told the story I would do so in a way that would make you laugh.  And I would be lying to you and myself.
It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life.
So I told her to lay down in bed, and I walked outside our cabin.  And I proceeded to walk around the ship for the next 3 1/2 hours, alternately trying to find a place to lay down and find a place to stay awake.  When we finally made port, we never discussed what happened.  It was shortly after that evening that I noticed our relationship slowly began to....fade away.  Excuses were made, plans were changed.
What was expected before was now inconvienent.  So she slipped though my fingers.  And I always wondered if that night on the cruise was one of the reasons.
If she imagined a life trying to cope with a person who slept the way I did...and do.

But I was lucky.  About 6 months later I met someone else, and the same cycle started again.  She would invite me to stay, I would beg off...until I finally relented.
But she did something that no one else had ever done.  She asked me why I didn't want to stay.  And I finally confessed....told "my little secret".  She told me that it was very easy to wear ear plugs while she slept.  So she began that practice.  One that over the course of our six years together would see her go to the hospital twice for ear infections.  I would feel a tremendous sense of guilt, but she would tell me not to worry about it.
We would go visit my family for various reunions and when the whole family would spend the night in one house, in the morning jokes would be told.  My snoring became the object of some pretty fair attacks.  I never said anything.  Hey, if you're going to dish it out, then take it....right?  So at every get together the magnitude of my snoring was made to be larger and larger....and as the jokes were told, I got smaller and smaller.  Well, not literally of course.  You see, part of the reason that my snoring got worse was that I was getting larger.  Domestic bliss, you understand.
So I sort of sat there and smiled.....on my face.
Of course, on the inside I wanted to shout out and say:
"I'M SORRY!  I'M SORRY!  WHEN I SNORE.....IT'S Because....its because....
I've stopped breathing.

So I went to my doctor a week ago.  And I told him.....that I was tired of being tired.  That I didn't want my car to go off the road because I fell asleep at the wheel.
That I was sick and tired of being.....sick and tired.  That I didn't want to fall asleep every night in front of the television, only to wake myself up with a snore and have my kids laugh because it sounded funny.  That I didn't want to fall asleep one night--
and not wake up.
I have too much to do!  I have a book to write.  I have to tell the world what really happened with my first two marriages (guaranteed best sellers).  I want to tell the world about the life my Aunt Ruby lead---her amazing life in a quiet town in South Carolina.  I want to rip the lid off of 20 years at the courthouse--the untold story!

So tonight....I'm going for another sleep study.  I'll be bitching and moaning the whole way in, because I'm sure that I won't get any sleep at all.  The staff at the hospital will hook with up with various wires and nodes and equipment to monitor my sleep--to see what's going wrong and what they can do about it.  The problem is, everytime I turn in bed....I'll rip one of the wires up and they'll have to wake me up to put it back on.  The over and under on tonight's sleep total?  One hour baby.
One hour of lousy sleep.  Maybe that's what I'll havethem put on my headstone:
"Finally I can sleep".
Only, I think I want to make it a few decades from now.  Hopefully, one night of lousy sleep tonight will lead to the rest of my life being full of restfull ones.

Later,
Jeff