Narc'd Off: A short introduction
I have Narcolepsy.
As I write my very first blog post, I feel it necessary to give you an insight into my condition. There are two types of Narcolepsy: Type 1 and Type 2. I suffer from Narcolepsy Type 2, a condition that causes excessive daytime sleepiness with involuntary sleep episodes, especially in relaxed environments and periods of inactivity (like lectures). Type 1 is usually accompanied by Cataplexy: when your muscles suddenly go limp triggered by strong emotions such as laughter, crying or terror.
"You need to drink Redbull" "Just drink loads of coffee" "Get an early night" - nope. It doesn't work like that, unfortunately.
It all started after my GCSE summer in 2016. I went back to school to start sixth form and started randomly falling asleep in my lessons - I even remember the very first lesson I fell asleep in (It was my first Politics lesson. Mr Floyd shouted at me and I dropped it two weeks later..). Teachers called me rude or lazy and accused me of staying up too late. My friends would laugh at me and draw on my face when I was asleep. Humiliated and confused, I had no clue why I would suddenly get so overwhelmingly tired and fall asleep! But after a couple of sleep studies, where I had wires glued to my face to monitor brain activity (see photo below; it was the only one I had, sorry Alice), I was finally diagnosed with Narcolepsy Type 2.
Four years on and I am still very much a narcoleptic. I am now in my second year of University, still snoozing through lectures. I was given a disabled room during my first year and am not sure if that was just a coincidence or not, but it was a bigger room than everyone else had. Every cloud......
Something that I struggle with the most is embarrassment. For example, I'll be working in the Uni library and I'll suddenly get a wave of tiredness, then my head will be on the table and I worry that people stare and laugh. Fairly recently, I was in a seminar with a substitute teacher and I began to feel a sleep attack coming on. As I slowly drifted off, I heard the teacher announce to the whole class in a very condescending manner: "Why don't we take a 5 minute break. And the young lady at the back - perhaps a coffee?". Humiliated and on the verge of tears, I decided to give him a metaphoric slapdown by informing him of my condition. Suitably admonished, his career in tatters, he proceeded to cry in the corner. To be fair to him, he later sent me an email apologising for calling me out and for being ignorant, which was appreciated. Being called out in front of a group of essential strangers for my narcolepsy is one of the most embarrassing moments I have experienced.
Following on from this, I want to highlight that there are many invisible conditions like mine, such as stupidity, ignorance and chlamydia - none of which apply to me. But all jokes aside, there are many people out there that suffer from very serious conditions, none more so than anxiety and depression, especially in the young, and we can rarely see these and we don't know what others could be going through.