WHAT IS IN A SNORE?

     Kawcaw

What is in a snore?

When I got married, on the wedding night, my wife Raj asked me. “Tell me about your major vices.”

I was in a fix. “If I tell you, you will leave me.”

“No, I will not. Promise.” she said with conviction. “But I need to know”.

I debated within myself, then decided to be frank.

“I smoke,” I said.

“Which brand?” she asked.

“Four Square,” I said, and added, “filter tipped.” Then I volunteered. “But if you insist, I will give it up.”

“No,” she said, “I love the aroma of filter-tipped cigarettes. Anything else?”

“I snore”, I said and laughed. She joined in the laughter.

In thus blithely dismissing snoring as a minor physiological defect, we both committed a major blunder. I presume that all these 47 years it must have been an irritant to Raj, waking her up when a particularly sonorous blast hit her eardrums. In fact, my performance was such that it even woke me up. But we just ignored the phenomenon as an inconsequential aberration.

Till the day I returned from my morning walk and was rewarded with a cup of tea. Suddenly I switched off and the hot tea spilt over my thigh. The damn thing made such a clatter as to summon Raj from the kitchen.

*What happened?” she enquired, picking up the pieces of broken china from the floor.

 I tried to dismiss the whole thing as “one of those things. I probably did not sleep well last night. I must have dozed off. Sorry about the cup. Was it very expensive?”

She raised anxious eyes to my face. “I am not worried about crockery, I am worried about you. The other day, we were talking to Usha and you switched off in the middle of a sentence. You probably went to sleep.”

“Did I? I don’t seem to remember.” I tried to make light of the whole affair.

We left the matter unresolved. One evening I went to attend a lecture at the India International Centre. My brother Predhiman had come to Delhi for a couple of days and I took him along .I was presiding over the function and was seated on the dais, I suppose in full public gaze.

During the presentation of the second speaker, I closed my eyes in order to better concentrate on what he was saying, I told myself. The next thing I knew was a gentle nudge from the third speaker Kapil seated to my right on the dais.

“He is about to finish,” Kapil whispered to me. I woke up. I realized that I had fallen asleep while presiding over a lecture.

On our way back, Predhiman told me that he was wondering how to wake me up without making a scene. He tried to ring up my mobile, but I had put the damn thing in silent mode and it just registered a missed call.

The matter was getting to be serious. Raj insisted that I see a doctor. That is when I learnt that the Pulmonary Department in Safdarjang Hospital also dealt with Sleep Medicine.

When the doctor heard my story, the text duly embellished by Raj, he enquired whether I snored. I thought he was being facetious. What could snoring have possibly to do with it?

But he was dead serious. He told us that snoring was a symptom that showed the body was not getting enough air. I would have to be admitted for a night so that the doctors could study my nocturnal behaviour.

Soon my sleep pattern was converted into computer-generated charts and diagrams, which the doctors studied with all seriousness.

They told us that the graphs revealed that on an average, in one hour, my sleep was interrupted 78 times. This limited the intake of air. I would have to buy a C-pap machine for about 50,000 rupees and use it regularly. Fortunately, I was covered under the C.G.H.S. and they would pick up the tab.

So snoring is no longer a phenomenon that one can dismiss as a joke. It is sleep apnea, a pretty expensive disease. In future, when we investigate the credentials of a prospective son-in-law, along with his horoscope and certificate of being free from AIDS, one would now also have to be sure that he does not snore!

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