The snoring mate

Illustration by Joseph Ngari

By Caroline Njung’e

The call came through at around 4.30am.

“Who could be calling at such an ungodly hour?”

I muttered to myself in irritation, my mind still fuzzy with sleep.

Blindly, I reached for my phone. It was my close friend Frida, and immediately, I sat up, wide awake, prepared for the worst.

“Do you know any divorce lawyer?”

“Huh?” I was taken aback because Frida and her husband of five years are one of the most loving couples that I know.

“Have you guys been fighting?” I fished

“No,” came the prompt reply.

“Did someone cheat?” I ventured.

“No!” came the exasperated reply, “I just can’t stand his snoring anymore…I want out and I want out now!”

I would have laughed myself hoarse, had I not been caught off-guard.

Who would want to divorce their husband for snoring? I wondered, incredulous.

But that was until I learnt that snoring is a common source of antagonism in many marriages. Snoring is said to be more common in men than in women, though it is not fully understood why.

You have only to talk to women to realise that there is a frustrated lot out there, nursing headaches that are the product of sleepless nights.

Come to think of it, my friend Frida has always been cranky in the morning. Those who know her assume that she just isn’t a morning person, yet her unlikely problem is sleep deprivation.

“You won’t believe how many times I have pictured myself strangling my husband in his sleep. I fear that I might just do it one of these days,” Frida shuddered.

It turns out that they fight about his snoring almost daily. The fighting almost always follows a similar pattern.

To begin with, Frida would gently shake her husband awake and politely ask him to change his sleeping position to see whether it would stop his snoring. This would work for a few minutes, and then the annoying rumbling would start again.

By then, Frida would have lost her patience and would be seething with frustration.

It is about this time that she would aim a kick at her husband’s bare legs, damn the consequences.

Even a saint would protest at this kind of treatment and her husband, who isn’t inclined to violence, would hotly protest that it isn’t his fault that he snores.

On a good night, her husband grabs a blanket, leaves the bedroom in a huff and spends the rest of the night on the living room couch. Most times, however, he digs in his heels and tells her to learn to live with it.

Those are the days when Frida goes to work with bloodshot eyes which make her look like she spent the night smoking something illegal.

No, she did not divorce her husband in case you’re wondering, but she is on a desperate search for a permanent cure to this nagging problem which is slowly nibbling away at her otherwise happy marriage. 

Trumpeting of an elephant

It would probably make good comedy, but the fact is that it is no laughing matter for that person who spends half the night trying to block sounds that would rival the trumpeting of an angry elephant.

“The most annoying thing about snorers is not the snoring itself, but the fact that they sleep like logs through it all,” says Anne, a woman who dreads bedtime because of her husband’s relentless snoring.

Unlike her partner, Anne is a light sleeper, and even the lightest of sounds brings her wide awake.

You can imagine the distress she goes through trying to grab precious sleep with what sounds like the reverberation of a faulty tractor engine in the background.

She admits that there are nights when she gets an overwhelming urge to push a pillow over her husband’s face as he lies there, snoring contentedly, oblivious of her dark thoughts.

Anne reveals that her husband has tried numerous remedies including taking a spoon of honey, (she read somewhere that it works) immediately before going to bed, but none has worked.

The two have reached a compromise that has brought them temporary peace – Anne goes to bed at least two hours before her husband and on weekends, she sleeps in while he keeps the children busy. 

Another solution that might work involves sleeping in the spare room, but the average Kenyan family lives in a two-bedroom house, so that leaves the couch. But this, many will tell you, can only work for a day or two before your hubby’s aching back sends him back to your comfortable bed.

Causes of snoring So, just what causes snoring and is there treatment for it?

“Anything that prevents you from breathing through the nose will cause snoring,” says Dr Manuel D’Cruz, an ENT surgeon.

It might be a blocked nose, a tumour in the nose or back of the nose or an allergy.

These cause a flutter of the soft palate, which is the soft tissue at the back of the roof of the mouth which, in turn, causes snoring.

-Daily Nation