It's officially official. I have every sleep disorder known to man.
Well, actually, no, it appears I have the grand daddy of the sleep disorders, which leads to the complications of other sleep disorders... I have, now, officially been diagnosed with narcolepsy.
The doctors and nurses are pretty sure that the cataplexy is there, though it is almost imperceptible, and has been made more imperceptible by the psych drugs.
Interesting note there, too. I have been a hallucinator since my early teens. Mostly visual and auditory, with a health dose of tactile thrown in. It started out mostly visual, then grew to auditory. Then I started to feel weird stuff... Limbs growing, limbs shrinking... Stuff like that.
Now we're wondering if maybe... it wasn't narcolepsy all along.
I've been a sleepychick since I was a chicklet. At the age of 10 I had horrible insomnia, and started needing naps again. Then it would go away as mysteriously as it started.
Happened again at eleven, and thirteen. I started to need to go to bed at 7 pm. What thirteen year old goes to bed at 7?
Of course, the battle with sleepiness probably got confused as the psych drugs were thrown in... They make you sleepy, after all. In college, things got better. I mean, I still did crazy things, like have doodles and long, unintelligible lines in my notebooks that I don't know how they got there... I still went to bed nightly at 9, and got up at 8.
The sleepiness has been something, though, that I learned to adapt to, mostly, till about the year 2000, when I went for my first sleep study. I was waking up every night, wide awake, at least fifteen times, and going back to sleep almost immediately. I was taking the train home and not remember even leaving work.
That's when they found the RBD. No apnea. Apnea came with the next sleep study. (Apnea does occur with narcolepsy a lot, I am reading.) Apnea was treated. Things improved a bit. Not a lot.
PLMD at the next sleep study. My REM latency is insanely long... thanks to the meds.
But the fact that the Xyrem is actually improving things I didn't think were cataplexy... till I ran them by the nurse and she said... "Um. Yeah."
Wow. There's a real reason for this. And maybe all these years... I haven't had the mental disorder I thought I had... Maybe... it's been narcolepsy all along?
Try wrapping your mind around that!
I'm a 34 year old woman with multiple sleep disorders (sigh). Sleeping's been a lifelong sort of love hate thing for me. I had my first polysomnography in 2001, and I was told I was "fine." Turns out, from my history and the muscle tone that the PSG returned, I showed signs of REM Behavior Disorder.
Fast forward three years, where my neurologist, on hearing my reports of ungodly fatigue (more like someone turned up the gravity) and daily headaches, declared I needed a sleep study.
That time they found moderate obstructive apnea.
Did my CPAP titration, wear it dutifully. But I was still so tired. I mean, tired like I was smote from on high. So two weeks ago, I had a re-titration.
They discovered (this time) I needed my CPAP turned up and I have Periodic Limb Movement in Sleep Disorder. I also have an extremely abnormal sleep architecture.
What I wouldn't give to sleep through the night!
