Trouble Sleeping

[DavidC]

Hey guys.

I have a problem.

When I'm sitting upright or lying on my back, I can generally breath just fine.

When I lie on my stomach, for some reason I have trouble breathing through my nose. My mouth works just fine, but I like to breath through my nose when I sleep.

I blow my nose before I go to bed, sometimes, and I don't sometimes, it doesn't seem to make a difference.

I'm pretty sure that what's happening here is that I have some snot (pardon the term, but I don't know what the medical word is), WAY up in my nose, like further than my finger or balled up kleenex can reach, and it can't be blown out.

Some solutions that I can think of would be nasal spray, nasal drops, and those band-aids that you put across your nose to pull your nostrils upwards/outwards (like football players use) because it works when I do things similar to this.

"Things similar to this" include:
-consciously flexing my nostrils outwards
-using a finger to stretch out nostrils (like if you were pretending you were a pig
-pressing one side of face firmly against the matress and moving my body down maybe a half inch or so, which produces an effect similar to pushing one of your cheeks upwards with your palm, and opens one of the nostrils

The problem with just flexing my nose open is that I can't sleep like that.

Normally, what I do is just lie on my back and wait til I'm exhausted, then roll over.

I haven't spoken with a doctor in a while, and I'm basically going to have to do that if this keeps up.

I really don't want to get into the nasal sprays/drops, because I know that some non-prescription things, like eye drops / laxatives can cause you to become dependent on them, physically. I'm a little worried that this may have similar effect: but I'd be willing to chat with a doctor about it.

I'm also against nasal surgery (oepning up some of those passages), because it might destroy my sense of smell/taste.

FYI, I've looked into a mirror at my nostrils (inner) and seen that they're actually shaped a little differently on eahc side. I suspect this is similar to people's ears in that everyone's is a little different... I never would have guessed. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Any suggestions other than what I've just put forth would be appreciated, and if anyone has had similar experiences, it would be nice to hear about it.

I feel like a Tool for posting this, since I've always answered "ask your doctor" to medical questions.

I assure you, that's the first step if I'm going to be doing anything involving chemicles.

--Dave.