a.rose

Diagnosis: narcolepsy type one, or narcolepsy with cataplexy (photo: New Years' Eve, 2010)  Every now and then, I manage to make it over to the book club my friends get together and do once a month. Back, maybe last summer, they read the book called, "Becoming Mortal: Medicine and What Matters In the End" by Atul Gawande. (Highly, hugely recommend, best book I've read in a long time.) While I was looking for it on the shelves at Barnes and Noble, I noticed another book called, "The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep." by Guy Leschziner. (also an amazing book. Do recommend, if you're interested in this kind of thing.) I bought both books. I read Mortal first because book club was that night, then gave myself over to find out what the nocturnal brain was all about. He discusses two patients with narcolepsy. While both of them were more extreme cases than anything I've experienced, every single thing he said about t...

 I first realized that I didn't exactly sleep the same way most people do when I was ten years old. My family had moved to São Paulo, Brasil. In the late hours of the night, I would be awake; wandering the big house, writing in my journal, setting the table for breakfast, and waiting for morning to come.  In high school, I blamed my exhaustion on seminary (a before school scripture study class that started at 6 am), and being on sports teams, clubs, and volunteering for different organizations - a busy lifestyle that probably would have made anyone tired. It seemed entirely reasonable that I would sleep, a lot. Except not always at night. It was still so hard to sleep at night. In college, I blamed my exhaustion on heavy class loads, working one, then two, then three jobs, trying to balance an active social life and maintain a Dean's List GPA. (And finding it hard to sleep at night). There were many mornings I physically could not get out of bed until I had planned out when my...