I’ve been a snorer ever since I was an adolescent. But when I was in my twenties, Barb told me that I actually stopped breathing on occasion. And by the time I was thirty, I often woke up in the middle of the night choking, struggling for air . . . feeling as if a silent, invisible intruder had crept up on me and stuffed a tube sock down my throat. Before I reached my mid-thirties, the nighttime choking incidents were occurring almost weekly.

Barb was convinced that I was suffering from obstructive sleep apnea, which occurs when the tongue and/or soft palate collapses during sleep and blocks the airway. So I read up on the condition (this was in the days before the Internet, which meant going to an actual library), and my symptoms did indeed seem to match those of sleep apnea.

Trouble was, I didn’t match the profile of a typical sleep apnea patient. At the time, the literature said that apnea sufferers were almost always overweight and/or smokers. I was neither.

So I tried piling up pillows to keep me lying on my side. I tried using those little adhesive nasal-strip things. I tried self-medicating with heroic doses of Benadryl, thinking that my allergies might be contributing to the problem.

But I woke up in the night choking when I slept on my side, too. The little adhesive strips just took the skin off my nose. And the Benadryl made me dopey. (Okay, dopey-er.)

So finally, at Barb’s urging (not to mention threatening), I told my then- physician — let’s call him “Theodoric of York” — about my sleep problems during a physical exam.

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The Unitarian Jihad. Many of you probably remember this, but just in case, I think we need this even more now than we did when Jon Carrol wrote…I mean, published this communique.

You can even be assigned a Unitarian Jihad name.