How I Tried to STOP SNORING

I wanted a quick fix, even if it meant strapping a glorified bike pump to my face

- Jordan Foisy

I think of myself as a good sleeper. Give me a book and a horizontal position, and I could fall asleep strapped to the top of a bullet train. Sleep has been a constant ally, a friend. When I was a teen, it was a refuge. I used to pray for sleep; its temporary oblivion was a welcome respite from anxiety and obsessive thoughts. It was a pause-not a death, but close enough to it. Every time I fell asleep, there was a chance of resurrection, to wake up new.

My girlfriend, Allison, however, does not think I'm a good sleeper. She knows the truth. At night, I thrash around and scream. Occasionally, it sounds as if my breathing stops. Worst of all for her, I snore. Badly. She's shown me a video of it, and it's horrifying: My thin, wheezing inhalations are interrupted by a wrenching tear of a noise, like someone ripping a carpet inside a cave. It sounds like a Hans Zimmer score. It's awful.

We sometimes get into little fights when I wake up. She has had a terrible sleep-flipping my sleeping body over and plugging my nose, or occasionally smothering my face with a pillow-and is justifiably annoyed. She can't stay mad for long, though, because who is she mad at? Certainly, it was my body, not me, that was snoring. My lungs moving the air, my soft tissues: Those are the guilty parties. I wasn't even there!

I TRIED TREATING MY SNORING with the junk-drawer solution of purchasing every anti-snoring device available: nose strips, mouth guards, nasal spray-anything that promised snoring absolution. Nothing worked. Every time, there would be a glimmer of hope, when we would try to convince ourselves my snoring was better. But every time, it soon became clear, the only difference was that the top of my mouth was now shredded from the cheap plastic of the so-called snore guard.