Metamorphosis: Decent

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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.

https://sleepyamerican.blogspot.com/

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.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omzsLqbgRaU

 

 

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.  from my blog /sleepyamerican.blogspot.com