In my dotage, I became a snorer. When snoring came, it was otherworldly. I hear. I do not know this first-hand. Indeed, I'm not a whiner, so I slept peaceably through it, without complaint. But the Approval Whore, Sarah, Bubbas 1 and 2, Dirt Glazowski, and others pointedly complained.
Pussies.
By the first time Sarah and I overnighted together, I knew exactly what to expect. I could recite our impending morning conversation from memory. "Here, put these in," I said, handing her earplugs. Love in her eyes, she laughed and said that wouldn't be necessary. The next morning, her eyes shone with another feeling altogether. Her right eyeball was twitching from all the murderousness.
"John, I've never heard anything like that," she said, shaking her head gravely. "I thought you were dying. You, like, would stop breathing and then gasp for air like you were being waterboarded. You need to see a doctor."
"Bitch, bitch, bitch," I replied.
Eventually it started to shatter my health. I never slept for longer than two hours, and usually much less. I was exhausted all of the time. At the grocery store, I would sit at the blood pressure machine just to catch my breath. I was sickly yet bloated. Edema set in, swelling all my extremities except for the one you'd want. My skin developed sores, permanently scarring my shins. I would nod off at my desk. I had a cough for two years. My cognitive functions declined precipitously.
"If you don't get a sleep study done," my doctor told me, "Don't come back here."
Whiner.
On a whim completely unrelated to the mounting criticism, I got a sleep study done. I was on the ferry home when the sleep doctor called me. "Come back," he said. "I don't want you going another night without a CPAP machine." Back at the office, he showed me a chart on which his thousands of patients were plotted. "You are not on this chart," he said. "Because you do not fit on it. Your case is the worst I've ever seen out of over 11,000."
Finally! After a lifetime of mediocrity, I'm #1.
He gave me my CPAP machine and a plea. "People hate them at first, but please stick with it. You literally can't live without it."
I strapped on the Alien face-hugger at 9:30 that night. I woke up at 4:15 the next day. That would be 4:15 PM. I had slept through an entire work day, including client meetings. Did co-workers Amy and Katrina panic? Did they care? Did they even notice? No, they did not. But I digress.
The CPAP had miraculous and immediate affects. The nagging cough disappeared straight away and never returned. My mind was much sharper. My energy was vastly up; I would no longer drive past the grocery store if a premium parking space were unavailable. My extremities halved in size. Indeed, I experienced 60 pounds of water-loss in a month. And of course, I was no longer passing out. I used to wake up at my desk, my hands still on the keyboard, and on the screen would be thousands of lower-case Qs.
No more.
It's three years later, and I'm healthy as can be. Even my hearing is perfect.
This is lamentable, for Fredo has become a snorer extraordinaire. He stalks me around the house, plopping his carcass next to me and letting it tear. His guttural lung-ripping is the background noise of my life. He's slowly driving me insane. I'm annoyed by this obvious karmic payback. There are a lot of people out there now entitled to call me a whiner.
But most of all, I’m annoyed by how much the little goldbrick sleeps.