When the power went out Saturday night, I woke up.

That's good. You're supposed to wake up when you can't breathe. If you don't wake up, that's bad. If you wake up too often, that's bad, too.

I'm one of 12 million Americans who suffer from obstructive sleep apnea. When I sleep, the soft tissues in the back of my mouth close up my airways and I wake up. Left untreated, these wake-up calls can come scores of times each hour, robbing me of deep sleep and putting me at risk for an unpleasant variety of ailments.

So I sleep with the help of a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine, mercifully abbreviated CPAP. The mask I wear over my nose is attached to a tube through which air is constantly blowing.

Some sleep apnea sufferers hate these machines, but I love them. Not only do they help me sleep better, but they also all but eliminate my snoring, which is sleep apnea's most obvious symptom. One of my fishing buddies snored so loudly that he would give the guys he was bunking with a half-hour lead at bed time. If they weren't sound asleep before he started sawing petrified logs, they would be up all night.

Now he rests quietly in the arms of Morpheus, and they can't blame the paltry size of their catch on sleep deprivation.

The only problem I have with the CPAP is it requires electricity.

There are many people who are more severely affected by a power outage than I, folks who need power to run their life support systems or their businesses. All I stood to lose was a few Z's. But as Sunday was going to be a long day for me, I was determined to get what sleep I could.

My Plan B is a device that is supposed to keep me from opening my mouth when I sleep. It looks like I'm wearing a blue jock strap on my head, but I wouldn't care if it worked well. It didn't. I kept waking up.

Then I discovered that I could snooze more soundly sitting in the stuffed family room chair. But the Cat Who Loves Me saw this as an opportunity to bond. I wouldn't have minded if he had not kept dismounting and remounting, giving me an 18-pound jolt to the lap every half-hour or so, until the power came back on at 5 a.m.

That night reminded me of what every night was like before I had a sleep study and got my CPAP.

Snoring is optional; regular sleep isn't.

The opinions are solely those of the writer. He can be reached at jamgordo@iun.edu.