My wife's Sleep Study confirmed what I had suspected all along: my wife has Sleep Apnea. What I didn't bargain for is that this Sleep Study has landed me squarely within the four corners of the proverbial dog house. Here's why:

My wife has snored all night, every night since I've met her. It's so bad that I wear Macks earplugs just so I can get to sleep with all the ruckus. She's seen me go through all the stations of Sleep Apnea: the sleep study, the titration, the missteps, and the successes, and knows how much it has improved my quality of life, and how important it is to my health. Knowing all this, one would think she would be eager to evaluate whether her own snoring was a symptom of Sleep Apnea. One might think that, but in my wife's case, one would be wrong. She's delayed and denied and refused to go in for a Sleep Study, despite my suggestions that it would be good for her to do so. Until yesterday. Yesterday Stanford Sleep Clinic opened the doors to its spanking new, very appealing new Sleep Clinic. It is the Four Seasons to the Motel Six I myself was tested at. We knew that this "Four Star" hotel-like clinic would open its doors to the public on February 17th, which is the reason my wife reluctantly agreed to have the Sleep Study done. But once she was admitted to the sleep lab, she became strangely hostile, complaining bitterly to me and the poor lab technician about every aspect of the process.

When the Sleep Study was over and I picked her up at the clinic, I thought the worst had passed. I was wrong: she was convinced she hadn't slept well during the test and that it had failed, and persuaded the doctor at the clinic to give her a call later in the day to confirm or deny her suspicion. When the doctor called this afternoon, he told her that they weren't finished scoring the test, but that they had enough data, and that she probably has a moderate case of Sleep Apnea, with an RDI of between twenty and thirty.

"I don't buy it," she snapped at me as soon as she hung up with the doctor. "That test sets you up for failure. How can you judge the quality of my sleep based on the worst night of sleep of my life? It's a B.S. test, and I don't believe in the test results at all."

She knows I do believe in the test results, and that she has a bona fide case of OSA, which sets me up as the bad guy. I write this article not to vent about my personal life, but because I think this dynamic is very common, although usually reversed: a wife getting tired of her husband's snoring, and encouraging him to get a Sleep Test, then when he gets diagnosed with OSA, denial and refusal to do anything about it.

If anyone has any advice, I'd like to hear it. It would help not only me, but I'm sure a lot of other people out there in the same boat.