I am a man of latter middle age, with a higher BMI number than I’d like, and I snore like a train. The third of these elements does not necessarily proceed from the first two, since I have it on the unimpeachable authority of multiple earwitnesses that I snored loudly in my twenties, when I was thin as a rail, and over the years since then as I have gradually become a man of substance. I finally yielded last month to the spousette’s tender advice (read “ceaseless browbeating”) and submitted to an overnight test aimed at determining the degree of sleep apnea I’m laboring under. The test itself was fairly unobtrusive, with a monitoring device attached rather counterintuitively to my right index finger as I slumbered fitfully in my own bedchamber.

The other week I was summoned, along with half a dozen other loud sleepers, to the offices of my HMO, where we were informed that we all had the condition, and I’m here to tell you that I was the silver medalist, and came within a whisker of first place (the winner was a head shorter than I am, had fifty pounds on me, and is a smoker). Apparently the normal distribution for eight hours asleep adds up to four hours light sleep, two hours REM sleep and two hours deep sleep. According to the test, I’m running a nightly deficit of 112 minutes on the deep sleep. Given that it goes back so long ago, the condition is probably neurological, involving a dodgy feedback mechanism—even when I’m half-awake the inhale reflex is sometimes tardy kicking in—although the creeping corpulence of age no doubt exacerbates matters.

So they sent me home with a “loaner” CPAP unit, which I’m to use until early next month when, after analyzing the recorded data from three weeks’ use, they will issue me a calibrated device. CPAP consists of a black box, a length of corrugated plastic hose and a rather cumbersome piece of headgear—L calls it the “face hugger”— that fits securely over my nose and feeds me air the night long.

The first evening I lasted just one sleepless hour before I removed the apparatus in disgust, but (in for a dime, in for a dollar) I toughed it out the following night and for the next (and past) ten.

I have not noticed a dramatic difference. A relative who has used the technology avers that he has been elevated from what was effectively a decades-long mild depression. I would certainly welcome a boost in my average mood, and the folks at the sleep clinic say that this is a not uncommon result of the regimen, but that it can take several months to manifest. I still feel rather weary most of the day, and particularly by mid-afternoon.

The device, not yet custom-calibrated, seems to have two settings: too much pressure, and not enough, although the former, to which I default, seems to vary over the course of the night, or at least over the course of the thirty or more minutes I now require before I’m able to sleep after attaching myself. At the outset, the blast of cold, dry air burns my nostrils, and I tend to breathe through my mouth, but by morning I find I’ve been using the nose. I do note that once asleep I go the night long almost without interruption, waking briefly perhaps once. Also, and as an unanticipated benefit, apparently “deep” sleep releases hormones that suppress the production of urine, so that feathery imperative no longer summons me to the Little Room three or four times a night.

I’m not particularly happy about the necessity of going to bed looking like a cross between an elephant and a military aviator, but my wife reports that the soft whir of the CPAP machine is far easier for her to sleep through than my raucous gobbling snores, so I will likely continue with the program, and hope that the customized appliance, for which I will be obliged to lay out some hundreds of dollars (I should have done this before CaesarCare, my formerly affordable and now-rapacious HMO, filled up its board of directors with former Enron executives a few years back), will be comfier. I’ll report back if the advertised sunny spirits ever kick in.

cordially,