For up to 22 hours a day Beth was asleep, not even waking at the loudest sound, only getting up in a dream-like trance to eat little food, drink water and go to the toilet.
She was later diagnosed with Kleine-Levin Syndrome (KLS); known as Sleeping Beauty syndrome, becoming one of more than 100 young people in Britain with the disease.
Little is known of the disease, except that it targets teenagers, from 16 years, and lasts for around 13 years.
Beth, an intelligent girl who always made excellent results, should have finished university by now and been on her way to becoming a child psychologist, something she’d always wanted to be, but her sleeping condition has killed all such dreams as she has since dropped out of college.
Since her diagnosis, Beth has spent more time sleeping than being awake, dozing through many holidays, including her birthdays and Christmases.
When she wakes up, she has to be told how much time has passed, and her confusion and frustration cause her to work herself into a state of agitation.
Her mother, Janine, who quit her job long ago to look after her, says that she usually looks forward to her daughter’s ‘on’ days, when she is able to live a fairly normal life.
‘It is like night and day,’ Janine told Daily Mail. ‘She might wake up tomorrow and then it’s a race against time to live the life she should have had. She rushes off to catch up with her friends and get her hair done. But no one knows when she might fall asleep again.’
Beth’s symptoms started with exhaustion, which her mom wrote off as normal teenage lethargy, but one day she fell asleep on the couch and wouldn’t wake up, the only signs of life being her breathing and incoherent child-like babbles.
One thing she also looks forward to doing is spending time with her boyfriend, Dan, a 25-year-old primary school teacher she met three years ago during one of her periods of being awake.
No comments:
Post a Comment