Years ago, like back in the 80s or something, when God was creating the world, he thought to himself, "Gee, I really ought to screw some people's lives up...after all, I'm God, and I can get away with that kind of shit." So he invented sleep apnea, a disorder that causes patients to stop breathing while they are asleep, which in turn causes them to wake up over and over again every night, which in turn causes them to curse God for being such a bastard in the first place.
Eventually a test called a polysomnogram was developed to help people figure out whether or not they had the disorder. Since there was no real treatment for sleep apnea, the diagnosis was usually one of "terminally screwed due to sleep problem or some shit like that." So while the polysomnogram was an excellent diagnostic, it offered little hope for those diagnosed with the disorder.
For years, people suffered silently with sleep apnea, because there was really no way to treat it other than having the patient avoid sleep altogether, and many people found that solution to be mildly problematic. But then, as if by the very grace of God (which would be in total contrast to his earlier decision to blight the poor sleep apneaics with the disorder in the first place), a solution was found and the CPAP machine was invented.
A CPAP machine is an air compressor connected to a volley of tubes which in turn connect to a mask which in turn is velcroed to the face of some poor bastard with obstructive sleep apnea (or to just anyone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time while said velcroing was taking place). The purpose of the CPAP machine, as it was explained, was to humiliate sufferers of obstructive sleep apnea and ensure that they never get laid again for the rest of their natural lives.
No one is entirely sure how the CPAP came into being, but some suggest that it was developed by Nazi engineers in 1938 in an attempt to keep the Master Race from breeding with inferior people (such as those with sleep disorders). The CPAP machine was perhaps one of the most ingenious devices ever conceived by the Third Reich, serving a dual role: (1) it ensures that the individual with sleep apnea gets a full course of what doctors call the "god damned jet engine up my frickin' nose" effect, and, (2) it makes the wearer of the device look nearly as ridiculous as a Baldwin brother in a production of Hamlet, which doesn't do much for enticing The Ladies to stay the night.
Another theory of how the CPAP came into being is that some damned doctor at some damned institution, in an attempt to kill off all his patients who had obstructive sleep apnea, noted one day that when he hooked the patient's head to the end of a giant air compressor, rather than explode (as the doctor had originally expected), the patients actually began to breathe easier, because the positive air pressure was keeping the soft tissue in the back of their throat from closing over their windpipe. The doctor ignored this finding, as it had nothing to do with his real purpose (killing off "those damn apnea bitches," as he liked to call them), yet the details of his original discovery remained, recorded in a notebook he used to keep by the toilet.
Later, after the first doctor was arrested for child pornography, tax evasion, and killing people with sleep apnea in the third degree (a misdemeanor in most states), another doctor read over the original head-in-the-air-compressor notes and found, scrawled in blood (or semen; nobody was really sure because back then it was acceptable to write using either medium) a single, two-sentence message:
"Blow air up the fuckers. That'll fix 'em."
And thus, the CPAP -- or Continuous Positive Air Pressure device -- was born. Soon, diagnosed sleep apneaics across the globe could stop suffering from their sleep disorder and start suffering from the "cure" that had been hacked together for them. Take this end and stick it in your nose, they were told by the nazi agents or evil doctors (depending on which story you accept). Now turn the machine on and try to breathe. Just pretend like you don't have an 800 horsepower leaf blower engine rocketing flumes of dusty air into your sinuses...this is the cure for your malady, damnit, so quit your whining, you bitchy little whiny-bitches!
Soon, it was agreed that if the purpose of the CPAP was to make everyone miserable, it had surpassed even the loftiest of expectations. For this reason, CPAP manufacturers immediately changed the official purpose of their machines to "make everyone miserable" so they could start printing "100% customer satisfaction" in six-hundred-point-type on all of their advertising materials.
Shortly thereafter, scientists developed the BiPAP, a device that was specially designed to be intolerable to patients in a totally new way. The BiPAP provided (through the same bevy of hoses and whatnots associated with CPAPs) horribly uncomfortable air pressure while inhaling, followed by slightly less horribly uncomfortable air pressure while exhaling, which resulted in both confusing the patient and destroying whatever was left of his or her fragile will to live.
Other doctors, working in other places, like Dothan, Alabama or Berlin or some shit like that, attempted to find another solution to the sleep apnea problem. Since the most common form of sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea, was caused by pieces of soft tissue in the back of the patient's throat collapsing over the windpipe during sleep, it became obvious that a new course of action might prove fruitful. Again, after several doctors were arrested for child pornography and other minor murder/mutilation charges, notes regarding their findings were discovered and scrutinized by crack teams of note scrutinizers. Again, the message left behind was short--but this time, it couldn't have been more clear:
"Cut lots of shit out of their throat. That oughta do something."
And so the surgical technique uvulopalatopharyngoplasty--from the Latin: “Oh Jesus, this is gonna hurt like a (insert Klingon curse word here)”--was developed as an alternative to the surprisingly unpopular CPAP and BiPAP solutions. Patients simply submitted themselves to the loving care of a scalpel-happy surgeon and his posse of whacked-out nurses and voila!--in only a few hours, your throat was cut all to hell, just like you requested. Sometimes this helped with sleep apnea, sometimes not--but it always helped with the ubiquitous "I hate being able to swallow solid foods" issue about which so many of today's youth complain.
After witnessing the development of such wonderful devices as the CPAP and BiPAP and the impressive mutilative skills involved in uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, sufferers of sleep apnea retreated to a far away land to live out the rest of their days in uvula-less, breathing-through-a-damned-air-tube, God-hating bliss.