"No, you cannot die from lack of sleep."

That's what the intern says to Edward Norton's character in one of the early scenes of Fight Club.

Until recently, I was blissfully un-sleeping impaired. I sailed right through my 20s and 30s knocking out 9-10 hours of sleep a night unless I was working some ass-kicking job like fighting wildfires where I only slept 4 hours at a stretch, usually under a green fire engine staring up at the drive shaft.

That's all changed. In the last year, thanks partly to a hideous genetic deformity (thanks Dad!) and partly due to getting old(er), I've now got sleep apnea. Or at least some form of sleep apnea because apparently there's like a dozen different kinds.

The fact that I had dental surgery in '02 and the quack I went to "perforated" my sinus cavity didn't help either.

And although it would be easy to hang my latest malady on the you're just fat hook, that doesn't really fly given that I had a friend last year who is the exact same age as me, skinny as a ferret and he sounds like an idling chainsaw when he sleeps. He told me he was convinced that the snoring was making his blood pressure high! Yep, that's just one of the genuinely serious and really fucking annoying things about snoring. My friend had a similar scenario to mine: he would fall asleep exhausted and wake repeatedly because he was on his back and some fat, fleshy glob of middle-aged tissue in his throat had relaxed and was threatening to cut off all his air. When my friend finally had to get up in the morning, he was usually so beat he had to slam caffeine throughout the day just to make it to quitting time.

I feel like blowing up a credit card company.

-- Mz M.