I do not have a problem with sleep. I only have to look at a pillow to zonk out. My boyfriend, however, has two problems: his bad back and my snoring.
Snoring was never a problem. I had no idea I was so bad until he recorded me on his phone. I sounded like a pig. A wounded pig. A big, fat, drunk, wounded pig.
Until recently, we had a sleep routine - one that suited neither of us. We’d go to bed on our rock-hard futon at about 11pm, both at the same end of the bed. Mark would wear earplugs and lie on his back with a pillow under his knees to ease his back pain, I’d be on my side to reduce my snorting.
I would stir at about two, to find myself faced with his feet, he having tried to put some distance between me and my snore. I would drift back to sleep.
An hour later he’d escape entirely to camp on sofa cushions in the living room. I’d wake with the alarm and my heart would sink - no Mark to be seen.
Waking up together is, for me, one of the great pleasure of a relationship, but sleep is one of the great necessities of life.
I’ve watched him get more and more tired the longer we’ve been together, and for all the wrong reasons. Neither of us was getting what we wanted. If this was to work, we needed to make drastic changes.
We decided on a two pronged approach - new bed (how delightful) and …surgery (Oh-My-God).
Mt first port of call was The Private Clinic in Harley Street, and Dr Kamami, the surgeon who developed Laser-Assisted Uvuloplasty in 1984.
He looked up my nose and into my throat, and told me that my snoring was partially as a result of having a thinner airway in my right nostril that the left, that I had a big tongue (lucky me), and the tissue in my soft palette could be tighter. He suggested having my nasal passage widened by laser, and possibly a laser removal of my uvula - the dangly bit at the back of the throat.
I balked at this rather drastic procedure, and decided to try the nasal passage being widened and my palette tightened with radio waves.
The procedure itself was over in minutes - he anaesthetised my throat and nose, shone a laser up my nose and took another probe to the roof of my mouth. This fires radio waves into the back of the throat, which heat the tissue and cause the soft palette to invisibly scar, and this tighten.
It was painless (the anaesthetic was the most unpleasant aspect) and weirdly, even though I spent the next week sounding like I had a heavy cold. my snoring reduced massively. I returned to have one more round on the throat, and there was even more of an improvement.
So, the surgery was less of a horror than I was expecting. The bed was even more of a delight. So, Mark’s back gets full appropriate support, and, as a result, pain is neither waking him up nor preventing him from sleeping.
The only problem we have now is that getting up has become really difficult - we just want to stay in bed all the time, as opposed to the brief time we were getting before I had the surgery and we got the bed.
It’s been quite literally what the doctor ordered.
Source: Gay Times
