Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

I am one of millions of Americans who had suffered for years with a terrible calamity that has caused me to be the focus of ridicule and jokes. Well maybe I didn’t suffer as much as those around me but I suffered none the less. As much as it pains me to admit it, the time has come where I can no longer deny what has caused so much turmoil for so many. Ladies and Gentlemen, I snore.

Oh sure, you are thinking that isn’t a big deal and doesn’t every old fat guy snore? Well, I seem to have finally found something that I excel at. You can ask my kids, who firmly believe that if snoring had been an Olympic sport I would have earned more medals than Michael Phelps! Growling animals have been known to come from hundreds of miles in the hopes of finding a mate when I nod off on the couch. That doesn’t even come close to the phone calls from the U.S. Geological Society when the earthquake monitors go off as my snoring reverberates through the land. I have even been blamed in church, yes I said church, for the snoring of other people and that odd low note on the organ that just has never sounded right. Yes, I snore and I do it well.

I found my snoring comforting, not unlike those white noise machines or the recordings of the love making of Orca whales that people like to sleep with. However, there are drawbacks to my ability to cause commotion. No one wants to share a room with me nor can I get away with wearing dark sunglasses and taking a nap at work. Even in the darkness of the movie theater I’ve had more than my share of buttered popcorn tossed at me during my naptime.

After visiting the sleep lab and being diagnosed with Sleep Apnea (where I again excel as noted by the 120 times per hour that I stop breathing when I sleep- that’s on average twice per minute for those of you keeping score) I received a brand spanking new friend to sleep with.

My machine, which I call Bill, is a wonderful new addition to my bed room. What amazes me most about it is how technology has advanced over the years and the new features it involves including heated humidifier. The best part of my machine is that it contains its own tiny cell phone and when I wake up in the morning and shut off the air, it calls a satellite and uploads data from my night. This immediately triggers an email to fill my spam box reminding me to go to my personalized web page for my “Sleep score”.

At first I thought this feature was pretty cool. It gives me a score based on how long I slept, how well my mask fit, and a few other items. Over the course of a few weeks I was able to see what nights I slept better than others and what I needed to work on. But then it happened. I received a special email one morning noting that I had achieved the famed Silver Badge for a score of 70 for each of the last seven days. Cool I thought, but then I started getting more emails urging me to set my sights on the Gold Badge and the even more elusive Golden Medallion. Seriously? I caught myself right away monkeying with what I was doing right to try to improve my sleep score and win a badge as though I was on some sort of arcade game high!

After a few nights of waking up with the mask so tight my nose was numb, three nights of having the tube wrapped around my throat twice and one strange episode where I pulled Bill onto the floor, I decided that it probably was best if I left the badge winning to other people and just be happy with the fact that my sleep is improving at night and in the long run that will make me healthier which was the main goal to start with.

See you next week. Remember….we’re all in this together.