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Snorers' Horrors
| Article
# : |
12519 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,147 Words |
| Author
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Steve Kaplan
Steve Kaplan is a widely published free-lance writer living in
St. Paul, Minnesota, who is also a contributing editor of St.
Paul Magazine. |
Did you hear the one about the perfectly matched couple? He snores and she's deaf. Now here's one about snoring that you probably haven't heard. Snoring can be anything but a laughing matter. It has been associated with high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, depression, a lower work performance, and can actually threaten the snorer's life.
Gary Hoffman of Hutchinson, Minnesota is an epic snorer who heard jokes about his snoring all his life, but about five years ago he stopped laughing.
The forty-three-year-old Hoffman started to notice changes in himself. "At gatherings I had always been the party clown, but suddenly I found myself failing asleep in company. My friends would wake me up and tell me to quit being a party pooper, and I felt like one. But I couldn't help it. Once I pulled up to a stop light with my wife and kids in the car and in the time we were waiting for the light to change, I fell asleep. You wouldn't think a person could fall asleep under those circumstances, with the kids making a bunch of noise and all, but I did."
The situation worsened for Hoffman that year. "I'd get up after what was supposedly a good night's sleep, take a shower, shave, have a good breakfast and be on my way to work, which was five miles down the road. The next thing I knew I'd be on the shoulder of the road, waking myself up and pulling the car back. Or going through town I'd blink my eyes and find myself headed straight for a parked car. That really scared me. It got to the point where I was very conscious of that happening. Whenever I was driving and I felt something like that coming on, I'd take deep breaths, or do anything to stay awake."
Every part of his life was affected. "I stopped doing any work at all around the house, because by the time I got home from work I was too exhausted to do anything but take a nap. It began to affect my sex life, too, and that snowballs and affects everything in your relationship. At work, my performance went way, way down. My writing got so bad that when I would try to write a memo, I'd only get three or four words down and the rest of it was just scribbling. I'd start over a half dozen times, but I just couldn't control it. That entire year was like I was in a fog or a daze all the time."
When he finally went for help, a doctor told him that he was basically in good health, although his blood pressure was borderline, and the oxygen content of his blood was
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