It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses Sleep And Throttles The Life Out Of Those Responsible

Marriage is a perilous thing. Don't get me wrong...it's a wonderful experience: wonderfully beautiful and wondrous strange and terrifying. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing in all of the preparations leading up the marriage...chosing the church, reception hall, bridesmaids...attending the bridal showers, marriage counseling (or not), rehersal dinner...prepares you for the gargantuanly infintisimal aspects of intimacy you will experience. Someone elses removed toenails, shedded foot skin, variously sized and colored eliminations...all of that is included in the love and cherish and sex.

My husband is a snorer (if such a word exists). He is a snorer of Valhallian proportions; both he and others have relayed fantastical stories of the volume of his snores. Early into our marriage these nighttime bellows were halted by the application of a c-pap machine; they are now back due to some cryptic malfunction preventing the c-pap from doing what it should. I'd grown used to the quiet while sleeping and now that the snoring has returned I find myself unable to fall and stay asleep without earplugs.

This would be an acceptable solution were it not for the simple fact that the earplugs block out all sound: the snoring, the soothing CD advertised to create peaceful dreams, the alarm that wakes me for my morning dose of synthetic thyroid, the other that wakes me for my morning dose of antidepressants. So I use them sporadically throughout the night, which provides only a placebo type help when it comes to sleep.
Combine this with the ever-increasing frequency of nightmares and my nighttime slumber has effectively been torn to shreds of a couple hours here, an hour there...I sleep in gasps. There are volumes of literature out there on the impact of sleep, or the lack thereof, on depression and vice versa and I have read enough of it to know that sleeping in this manner...in fits and starts...is to the illness like a match to a gasoline-soaked warehouse of firecrackers and napalm. Basically the catalyst for the inevitable disaster that comes when it is struck and applied.

Last night it was sleep...waking to a frantic dog in need of peeing...sleep...one nightmare...sleep...yet another...doze...one more, all to the tune of loud, penetrating snores. I gave up somewhere around too early 'o' clock and am now hoping beyond hope that I can wring out another half hour, hour of slumber before I start my day.