We lived in a "commie block" and we could hear our neighbor snoring super loudly during summer when we all had our windows open for the night.
One night, we heard him repeatedly stop breathing and then gasp for breath. So when I've seen him the next day by the elevator I told him: "Sorry to bother you, but we can hear you snoring" and he has gotten super apologetic. But I continued, "yeah, we are used to it so don't sweat it. The trouble is, you are stopping breathing recently. You may have sleep apnea. Go see a doctor, STAT. You don't want your brain to die off due to a lack of oxygen."
He told me in a couple of weeks he's got a CPAP and is working to shed some weight off. In a year he went back to a more normal weight.
He also started dating our neighbor. Curse those open windows... :-)
I remember sharing a room with my snoring grandfather as a kid, and the shortness of breath pauses, which were much, much more disturbing than the snoring itself, especially to a young person who's aware that old people sometimes die in their sleep. Wasn't until a lot later I made the sleep apnea connection
(he lived another couple of decades to a grand old age. When the cancer did get him, the neighbours said the cessation of his notoriously loud daytime sneezes should in hindsight have been a giveaway about the change in his general health...)
We lived in a "commie block" and we could hear our neighbor snoring super loudly during summer when we all had our windows open for the night.
One night, we heard him repeatedly stop breathing and then gasp for breath. So when I've seen him the next day by the elevator I told him: "Sorry to bother you, but we can hear you snoring" and he has gotten super apologetic. But I continued, "yeah, we are used to it so don't sweat it. The trouble is, you are stopping breathing recently. You may have sleep apnea. Go see a doctor, STAT. You don't want your brain to die off due to a lack of oxygen."
He told me in a couple of weeks he's got a CPAP and is working to shed some weight off. In a year he went back to a more normal weight.
He also started dating our neighbor. Curse those open windows... :-)