Nightime sounds

We are in Micronesia now. There are beautiful Hawaii-looking islands all around us. A group of twenty or so local people came onboard today to work as translators. Many of them are in my berthing area. They all snore at night.



Actually that’s really an understatement. Imagine that you took a tape recording of someone snoring. Then imagine you took that recording and made 10 more variations of it, varying the pitch, frequency, and overall character of the snores in each iteration. Now imagine that you played all those tracks at once, slightly out of sync with one another. That is kind of what my bunk room sounds like at night.



Medicine provides a perfectly good explanation for this impressive nocturnal serenade. Most of these people are overweight, or what we in the US would call obese. Why is that? Well it’s the whole nature vs nurture debate. Do these people have poor eating habits? Yes they do. I’m told that spam and sausage are staple items in the local diet. But part of it is just bad luck after taking a nice refreshing swim in the tropical gene pool. If your parents are fat you’re likely to be fat too, whether it’s the work ethic, eating habits, body habitus or whatever e else that you inherit from them.



PNG-ians come from Australia. To some approximation they look like the Bushmen you’ve seen on national Geographic. They are dark-skinned with thick curly hair. Their faces have prominent brows, so much that the eye surgeons on the ship say that removing cataracts on them was like “working in a hole”.



Micronesians come from the Phillipines. They remind me of Hawaiians, who derive from Polynesians, and Polynesia is just a few more hundred miles north and east of here in the Pacific. They are big, happy island people.


OK so getting back to sleeping. If you snore at night, you probably have what is called obstructive sleep apnea. You have the right combination of anatomy and floppy tissues such that your airways get blocked when you try to inhale at night. The fatter you are the worse the problem is. It’s usually not so bad that you actually suffocate but you do go for stretches of time where you essentially stop breathing. That’s bad for your brain because it needs constant oxygen. It also sort of wakes you up every time you need to suck harder to get air and so you never really get into REM sleep. It’s because of this subtlety that you do not get restful sleep. You feel tired all day. And this in turn makes your high blood pressure, your cholesterol, and your diabetes all get worse.


--pete