What should I do if my lover snores? A story about obstructive sleep apnea

This is a story about why thin people snore. The story begins at a specialist clinic last Thursday.

"Next!"

The door was pushed open at a 45-degree angle, and a familiar tall figure came into my clinic, but I couldn't remember who he was at once.

"Shangguan! Help me!" He took off his mask to reveal his tired face, "My wife said she wants to kick me out! I think my rhinitis must have worsened recently. Can you help me take a look..."

At that moment, countless images flashed through my mind, but I still couldn't remember who he was, so I just followed his words and said, "No matter how severe your rhinitis is, it won't keep you from returning home, right?"

"It's me! I'm A Long. Don't you remember me?" Seeing that I reacted a little coldly, he smiled and said, "My snoring has been getting worse and worse recently. My wife said that it felt like a decoration team was living in my body at night. She couldn't stand it and wanted to sleep in a separate room from me. I wonder if my rhinitis has worsened again." "A Long! Of course I remember you. You practiced hurdles in high school. I seemed to call you a man like the wind!" I said with a smile but not without embarrassment.

It turned out that the person in front of me was A'long, my high school classmate. I remembered that he was tall and thin, and his nickname was "Running Bamboo Pole".

Aaron took out a tissue and blew his nose vigorously. "My physical strength is not as good as before. I snore at night and doze off during the day. I feel groggy and drowsy overall. My blood pressure is also high. I always feel that after I got rhinitis, my health has been getting worse and worse, and I have gained a lot of weight."

"You're not fat at all. Logically speaking, even though you're a little fatter than before, your figure is basically a standard figure, and you don't look like a snorer."

"I know that too! They say only fat people snore, so I suspected it was caused by rhinitis."

After checking the nasal cavity and throat one by one, Aaron and I said that the rhinitis was not a big deal, and we would do a sleep monitoring at night to see how serious it was.

The next day, I took Aaron to look at the report and analyze his situation.

"Every night, you fall asleep immediately, but always wake up with a start. When you are in a light sleep, you suddenly wake up because of suffocation?"

"How do you know?"

"How many times do you get up every night, but you don't quite remember it, and you always feel suffocated in your dreams?"

"Yes, there was."

"When I woke up in the morning, my mouth was so dry that I drank a large glass of water, but my throat still felt uncomfortable. I feel sleepy as soon as I sit down during the day, and I have no energy all day. I always almost fall asleep while driving?"

"Yeah, that's right!"

"There is only one truth! Who says only fat people snore? Your rhinitis has indeed worsened recently, but generally speaking, the nasal congestion caused by rhinitis is not enough to cause severe snoring. You hold your breath 30 times per hour on average at night, and the longest time is 57 seconds. After holding your breath for such a long time, your blood oxygen saturation drops to as low as 71%. Throughout the night, you switch back and forth between holding your breath and waking up countless times, over and over again. In the past year, you have had four attacks of purulent tonsillitis, and repeated inflammation has caused your tonsils to swell to 3 degrees. Your two tonsils are like two meatballs, blocking the respiratory tract in the pharynx!"

So, there is only one truth! You have obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA. And the culprit of OSA is not rhinitis! It is swollen tonsils!

Later, when I took a picture of the tonsils I had cut off and showed it to Aaron, he exclaimed: "Isn't it possible that these two pieces of flesh must weigh two taels? No wonder I have been feeling blocked all the time!"

"It's definitely not two taels, but it's really congested."

One day three months later, the door of the clinic was pushed open, and the wind-like man came for a follow-up visit, and his wife came with him.

This time, he said, "Shangguan, help me! Since I stopped snoring, I am no longer so sleepy, but a new problem has arisen! I used to be able to fall asleep in a second, but now I have trouble falling asleep because I found that my wife snores so loudly that I can't fall asleep at all!"