Embarrassing Snoring

‘As a woman, I found it particularly embarrassing, because somehow snoring just seems so unfeminine’

ALICE WYLLIE

Kirsteen Gardner, 39, is a nurse from Edinburgh. She received laser treatment from Professor Kamami through The Private Clinic to control her snoring. I’VE BEEN aware of my snoring since I was a child. When I was about ten I stayed overnight with my cousin, and she told me she had to go and sleep in another room because I was snoring so loudly. Ever since then I’ve been quite self-conscious about it.

It just got worse as I got older and I once fell asleep on the train when I was travelling up from London to Edinburgh with a friend and, when I woke, she told me I’d been snoring really loudly. I began to get quite paranoid about it and, no matter how tired I was, I wouldn’t allow myself to fall asleep in a car or on public transport.

On another occasion I shared a hotel room with one of my colleagues after a Christmas night out a few years ago, and the next morning at breakfast she told everyone that she didn’t sleep at all because I was snoring so loudly. I laughed along with everyone else, but I was so humiliated. As a woman, I found it particularly embarrassing, because somehow snoring just seems so unfeminine.

I was always on my guard and I was so concerned about nodding off on a friend’s couch or staying over at their house. When I have stayed with friends or gone away on holiday with them, I’ve been too self-conscious to get a proper sleep and I tended to enter a level of sleep where I woke myself up whenever I felt myself snoring.

Housemates have even told me that they could hear me snoring from downstairs, and when I fell asleep at a friend’s house, her nine-year-old daughter recorded my snoring on her mobile phone and played it back to me. That was so embarrassing, and at that point I decided I really had to do something about it.

I had tried a number of different options from the chemist, but because my problem was located in the back of my throat, none of them had been particularly effective, so I decided to try laser treatment. The cost of the procedure wasn’t an issue, because I had got to the point where snoring was affecting my quality of life.

After the procedure, I stopped snoring immediately and haven’t snored since. A couple of weeks later I went on a trip down to Yorkshire with a friend. On the drive back up, I was really tired and, where before I wouldn’t allow myself to nod off, this time I went straight to sleep. When I woke up, I asked my friend if I had snored. When she told me I hadn’t, it was a fantastic feeling.

Source: The Scotsman