** This story is the first of several detailing my onset of, struggles with, and rising through the embers left after the storm of severe narcolepsy with cataplexy,fibromyalgia. Diabetes type 2, and Hepatic Adenomas, etc.
The world tells us that disability, chronic invisible illnesses are signs of deformity, weakness, sloth, etc. However, so loud they clamor clumsily so.... the world waits for us to fall flat on our face, crying, giving up in a fetal position on the cold hard floor. Any society which doesn't address our unique worth in society, is one in need of a proper enlightenment.
The world tells us that disability, chronic invisible illnesses are signs of deformity, weakness, sloth, etc. However, so loud they clamor clumsily so.... the world waits for us to fall flat on our face, crying, giving up in a fetal position on the cold hard floor. Any society which doesn't address our unique worth in society, is one in need of a proper enlightenment.
Most persons like myself are
born healthy, live relatively normal childhoods, but develop and
onset with permanent, autoimmune, and/or life altering health
challenges. I began having fibromyalgia symptoms at age 19 which
included extremely cramped calves all the time. I avoid stairs like
nothing else, because they light up my entire lower muscles up in
profound pain. At age 20, when I moved to attend Texas Woman's
University, unknowingly, I began randomly falling asleep in class, no
matter how much sleep I had nor how exciting the lectures were, as my
friends witnessed.
My now ex-husband and I moved to an off campus housing my junior year at Texas Woman's University the spring of 2001. I took a job as an Animal Lab Care Assistant that summer part time in the mornings. I would go to work, come home by non, and crash the rest of the day in he living room . I began having microsleeps and automatic behaviors, trying to put two food bowls instead of one water-bottle, one food bowl. Falling asleep and sliding to the floor from a stool during discussions while on break... freaking out and concerning my coworkers.
Preparing for my full-time
classes, I quit my job that August. I always attributed my sleepiness
to being such a serious, diligent student... September 11, 2001, I
awoke to the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, after
my shower, I witnessed the second tower getting hit and horrifyingly
collapse to the ground.... My heart,my stomach punched the ground
fervently. My heart broke, sank to the depths of sadness and fear. I
remember feeling deeply troubled trying to undetrstand why and how
anyone could possibly think by committing mass murder plus suicide
thru such violence, that they could change anyone person or nation.
The real threat of nuclear
warfare now palpable, I began having very realistic nightmares,
hypnagogic hallucinations, in which my brain was twighlighting
between sleep and awake. Concurrently unable to move, but fully aware
of being in my own bed, I felt my flesh hurt and burn as I
frantically was trying to move to get my family to a bomb shelter or
safest place possible before the terrorists bombed us again. I often
could see our bed with a hooded black figure, taunting me as I lay
helplessly paralyzed and scared. That week began my nearly all night,
every night sleep paralysis with concurring hypnagogic
hallucinations.
The next several months were
some of the most stressful, life resigning and scary changes of my
life. I researched online to conclude I definitely had a problem
with hypnagogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. Mid October, my
knees began giving out, causing me to jerk upwards to not fall
whenever I laughed or got angry. By December 2001, I was having many
fall to the ground paralyzing cataplexy attacks to most any joke I
read, heard, attempted to tell. I learned online that this phenomena
is cataplexy, and together with Excessive Daytime Sleepiness,
Hypnagogic Hallucinations, and Sleep Paralysis, were the full
tetradic symptoms of the sleeping disorder Narcolepsy.
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