The Guide to Getting It On (169 page)

CHAPTER

85

Snoring & Passing Gas

T
he best love-making techniques in the world will take you only so far if your sleeping self passes enough gas to blow the sheets off the bed, or if you snore so loudly that your partner has to check into a hotel, without you. Do both, and your relationship is in double jeopardy.

Flatulence

People with the healthiest diets tend to pass more gas rather than less, but then again, so do people who drink a lot of beer. Whether your gas is from granola or
Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout,
there are things that you can do to keep your co-workers from calling you the human crop-duster.

The average bum releases from one to three pints of wind each day. But the real killer is that not all air biscuits are created equal. Some are little worse than musty turnips; others can fell men in uniform.

No matter how burly or dainty your lover is, he or she has between fourteen and twenty events a day. Pound-for-pound, girls pass as much gas as guys. It is foods full of complex carbohydrates that make the foul winds blow: everything from fresh fruit to beans and broccoli–virtually anything that’s good for you. The thing that creates the ghastly odor is foods that contain sulphur.

Since the array of bacteria in our large intestines varies from person to person, a food that hardly causes a ruffle in Bob’s boxers might blow Betty’s dress up to the ceiling. And Brooke might be a poster child for the Milk Advisory Board with nary a bark from her bum, while anything more than a cup of milk or a single egg can cause Brianne to clear out an entire gymnasium.

If friends issue a foul-wind advisory whenever you spend the night, try to find what you might be eating that is generating so much gas. You also need to determine if your gas is a normal by product of digestion, or if it is a symptom of a medical condition that can include constipation, ulcers, gastric reflux, irritable bowel syndrome and several other things including cancer. Only a healthcare professional can help you chase down the medical causes. There are also a number of medications that can cause an increase in gas, as well as sugar substitutes such as sorbitol and xylitol.

If you think the culprit is food, be mindful that it is often combinations of foods rather than just one food that makes a rectum rumble. Start eliminating foods on a trial-and-error basis, although we suggest you keep the chips and tequila until the very end. Also, below a certain threshold, things like onions and mushrooms might be fine, but serve yourself a second helping, and you’re a poop-chute flute.

As for things like Beano, simethicone, and holistic approaches such as peppermint and ginger, don’t hold your breath. What might work for one person won’t stop a single toot in the next.

One of the best articles available on the subject of gas or flatulence is by Margaret C. McDonald,
The Facts About Flatulence.
It can currently be found online at
www.spectrox.com/flatulence.html
.

Also, there is a highly-effective carbon-embedded seat cushion that not only filters out the bad smell, but muffles the sound. It’s the same material that is used in Haz-Mat operations, but packaged so well that no one at your office or sorority will know. You can fart to your heart’s content while sitting on the thing, and offend no one. Their website is
www.gasbgon.com
, and their phone number is 877-GASBGON. Talk about a Christmas present that will blow your loved ones over! We test drove two of them here at Goofy Foot Press. We threw everything we had at ‘em. Here’s the official Goofy-Foot review: “Tired of your loved ones searching under your chair to make sure the cat didn’t die? The GasBGon seat cushion works well enough that you don’t sound like such a fool when you blame the kids or the dog. And you can take one to bed with you, much to your partner’s relief.”

One thing that we learned in researching this pressing problem is that there are people with serious physical problems who are unable to control when, where and how much they fart. This now explains the author’s entire sixth-grade year in Sister Justina Isabel’s class. Some people with serious gas problems are so mortified that they never go out in public, but that never stopped her. The GasBGone company makes carbon-embedded underwear and seat cushions that can help free people with these disorders from their gastric confinements. And if you’re a guy who has trouble thrusting without kicking out some serious smells, cut a hole in front of the Haz-Mat Depends to pull your penis through. Too bad GasBGone doesn’t make them with a built-in cock ring to help prevent blow-by.

By way of summary, don’t let gas put a cloud of uncertainty over the future of your relationship. In the order of things in life, the fart is mightier than the desire to have sex, at least in people who you might have sex with. Fortunately, there are things most of us can do to get it under control.

Snoring

At least with gas, you get a measure of your own medicine. Not so with snoring. Snoring is on the short-list of problems that cause sexual partners to sleep in separate bedrooms. Unless the snorer has sleep apnea, he or she is unlikely to be impacted by the snoring, except for wondering why his or her partner is so cranky about it.

Snoring is an acoustical nastiness that happens when your breath collides against tissue that’s inside your nose or throat. It mostly happens during sleep, because muscle tone in the throat decreases after the sandman pays a visit. The air rushing past the sagging tissue causes vibrations that can make your sleeping self sound like a drowning donkey.

Another culprit might be a blockage in your nasal pathway. This could be from a broken nose, a chronic allergy, infection, or structural defect. It can either be the sole source of your snoring (called nasal-based snoring), or it can cause you to breathe through your mouth, which gives you the snoring capacity of a level-5 hurricane.

Your tongue can also be contributing to the problem, but you don’t have to be asleep for your tongue to get you in trouble.

Being overweight, drinking, smoking, and taking drugs are at the top of a long list of snoring stimulators. Hopefully, you are starting to get the idea that snoring can have an array of different causes. Until you determine the specific cause or combination of causes, you will have better luck milking a moose than finding a cure.

You might also have sleep apnea—which is at the Mayday end of the snoring continuum. This is when your breathing stops for more than ten seconds at a time. When that happens, the sensors in your brain suddenly say, “Oops, looks like we’re dying!” and they generate a snort that sounds like feeding time at the pig farm. This can happen hundreds of times each night, with periods of dead silence followed by wickedly-loud snorts.

Sleep apnea is always a sign of danger and needs evaluation by a sleep specialist. It can be a forewarning of heart problems, high blood pressure, and diabetes. It can also cause extreme fatigue and depression because it interferes with REM or dream sleep. Treatment might include a special type of mouth piece or a device that blows air into the sleeping lungs, as well as dire warnings to lose weight, start exercising, and stop smoking and drinking.

There are all sorts of people who are happy to take your money for snoring cures. There are also physicians who will hack up the back of your throat in the name of curing the problem, even though there are few studies on the safety or long-term effectiveness of these procedures.

Why not get a voice-activated tape recorder and a mic to put on the headboard or wall above your head? Also, get a clock that speaks the hour. This will activate the recorder so you can learn what part of the night your snoring occurs. Conventional snorers will often start sawing logs as soon as they fall asleep, while snorers with sleep apnea tend to build steam later in the night. Sleep experts can get important clues about the cause of your snoring based upon its pitch, frequency and timing. The tape recording will help them and you to understand more about the problems.

Once a sleep specialist is able to pinpoint the cause of your snoring, research the heck out of it. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you agree to any surgeries or throat injections without getting a second opinion by a specialist who doesn’t work with the first one. Spend lots of time on snoring forums reading the posts of people who have had the various procedures.

Recommended:
One snoring aid that looked promising was exercises for strengthening the muscle tone in the throat. These were designed by Alise Ojay, a singing instructor in England. They seem to be quite helpful when the problem is caused by lax throat muscles. Why not give this a try before letting a doctor cut up the back of your throat or inject funky substances into it? Read the articles on this woman’s website:
www.singingforsnorers.com
.

Take Heed!

If loved ones at are their wits end do to your snoring, please don’t ignore them because you can’t hear yourself. Hook up the tape recorder as we suggest, so you can get an idea of what has them in such a state. And then, for the sake of your relationship if not for yourself, set out to learn all you can about the problem. Put together a plan of action, and see if you can’t improve the situation.

CHAPTER

86

Sex & Hysterectomy

I
f a woman in our society has her reproductive organs removed, no one takes much notice. It’s an everyday surgical event. But if a man has his testicles removed, we gasp. Are a man’s organs more important?

Until the 1990s, when managed health care started taking a closer look at surgeries, approximately 665,000 hysterectomies were performed each year on women at an average age of 42.5 years. A university professor who was a second-opinion expert for Blue Cross reported, “The patients who had the recommendations for the hysterectomies either had no pathology whatsoever or had pathology that was so minimal it was inexplicable to me how anybody could have recommended surgery.”

There are times when hysterectomy is necessary to save a woman’s life, as in cases where cervical or ovarian cancer is found. Hopefully, if your physician recommends a hysterectomy, you will seek a second opinion. It is your body and your right.

Hysterectomy & Sex

There is nowhere near the kind of solid research on hysterectomy and sex that you would think, given the large number of hysterectomies that are done each year. To help with any decisions you might need to make, Annie Bradford, a researcher from the University of Texas at Austin, has been kind enough to off the following perspective to readers of
The Guide: