When it got to the point where his wife had to sleep in the bath, Mark Palmer decided something had to be done.
My father had many wonderful qualities – but for my mother he must have been difficult to live with. He was kind, amusing, endlessly patient. There was just one problem: he snored for Britain. Now, I may not have inherited much of his warmth and merriment but, my goodness, I’ve followed his example as a serial snorer.
When I was ten years old, my father and I went skiing in the Cairngorms. I don’t think I had ever shared a room with him before. We had twin beds. On our first night, my father placed various pairs of shoes and slippers on the floor. They were lined up in order of heaviness: slippers, loafers, lace-ups, walking boots and finally our two pairs of ski boots.
‘If I start snoring, throw the slippers at me,’ said my Pa. ‘If that doesn’t work throw the loafers and then keep going.’ Which I did. Without success. He snored all night and woke refreshed, albeit surrounded by footwear. I hardly slept a wink and was grumpy for the whole day.
Fast forward fifty years and if you were to ask my wife what she would change about me (from a long list), she would say, without hesitation, my tendency to shake, rattle and roll the entire household almost immediately my head hits the pillow. Well, didn’t she hear this coming, you might ask, given that we have been married seven years? To which the answer is ‘no’ because in the early days I slept without a murmur.
Then, one weekend, we were staying in a hotel and I awoke on the Saturday morning to find my wife curled up in the bath, with a blanket and a couple of towels spread over her. ‘I tried and tried to stop you but you just turned over and started up all over again,’ she said. Terribly sorry. It won’t happen again. Maybe I had overdone it on the rib eye and chocolate profiteroles at dinner. But the next night, the same thing happened again.
Things got so bad that I went to my GP, who sent me to a specialist at Charing Cross Hospital. He put a wire with a light at the end of it down my nose. Then he said he wanted me in for a pre-op examination to see if removing or reducing my uvula at the back of the throat would do the trick. This is the little muscle that causes a vibrating noise by obstructing the upper airways. Snoring, in other words. The specialist said I would be out of action for a day because I would need a general anaesthetic for this fact-finding manoeuvre, after which, if appropriate, I would undergo the main operation under another general anaesthetic. It sounded a little severe.
Then I saw an ad for laser surgery and found myself having a free consultation with a young woman at something called the Private Clinic.
‘Your tonsils are good and strong, aren’t they?’ she said, as I opened wide and mumbled ‘Aaah…’
‘Actually, I had my tonsils out when I was about twelve years old.’
Perhaps not noticing an absence of tonsils is an easy mistake but it did not fill me with confidence when she delivered her conclusion – which was that I was the ‘perfect candidate’ for laser surgery to remove most of my uvula plus some of the soft palate around it.
If I were to go ahead with the operation at the Private Clinic’s Harley Street rooms, I would feel pain for about twelve days ‘like a very bad sore throat’. I should refrain from alcohol during that time and eat lots of puréed food. There might be some post-operative bleeding. I should avoid swimming or intense exercise for two weeks and would be susceptible to mild infections for a while.
And the good news? My snoring should reduce by 60 per cent. But I was then asked to sign a form accepting that because the snoring was not necessarily throat-induced the difference might not be quite what I had hoped for. Oh, and all this would cost about £2,000.
But I had no intention of having the operation. I had already chanced upon my own solution several weeks previously – and it cost me less than £50. It’s called SnoreWizard and is a mouth guard but with a couple of crucial differences. It moves the jaw forward to improve the flow of air and there’s a flap over which your teeth sit, which holds it in place. Crucially, it has a hole at the front so you can breathe.
For the first few nights, I found it uncomfortable to sleep with a chunk of plastic in my mouth but the joy of waking up and realising that my wife was not about to speak darkly about our future more than compensated.
I have since discovered that operations to cure snoring seldom work. Dr John Stradling, who heads up the Oxford Centre for Respiratory Medicine, says people ‘should do everything to avoid the sleep clinics in Harley Street, which are always one step behind the evidence. Some of us think the only benefit of undergoing an operation of this kind is that it leaves you so sore that you can’t eat properly for six weeks. This means you lose weight, which might be beneficial, but it’s hardly a solution to snoring.’
So my advice is to avoid operations and buy a piece of plastic instead. I also gave up alcohol in January (well, for a couple of weeks anyway) and it reduced my snoring dramatically. But there’s no need to dwell on this inconvenient fact.
