Helping Others To Understand

It gets frustrating when my own family and friends call me while I am taking my daily nap only to hear them say," Are you sleeping? Get up you lazy butt." I wish they knew what it is like to live day by day, being able to do things you want to do, only when there are windows of opportunity. A narcoleptic cannot plan something for a particular time, because he or she may need a nap at that time.

I know they say it because they are uncomfortable with waking me up or possibly just don't want to believe that I have a medical condition. They know I am not lazy because I frequently go to the bike trails and ride for ten miles and I workout in the gym. The only problem I have is the fact that I have to sleep a minimum of two hour per day after I finish work.

Let me explain it like this...When a healthy individual goes to sleep at night, they fall into different stages of sleep until they hit REM sleep stage. This stage typically takes ninety minutes to get to. Because they slowly get to REM, their batteries get a full recharge.

In narcoleptics, we skip the different stages and fall directly in REM. It is my understanding that the brain is nearly as active in REM as it is while you are awake. This is why narcoleptics batteries do not get a full recharge, and they physically and mentally crash on a daily basis. We do go into various sleep stages, but are not in them long enough to get a replenishing sleep. We are a lot like the cell phone you may have had, you have to keep it plugged in because it goes dead in ten minutes.

It needs to be understood that people with narcolepsy are not lazy, they are so completely exhausted all the time because their sleep is so fragmented and never refreshing. There are also a lack of hypocretin cells located in the hypothalamus. These cells control our sleep and wake cycles. Without these cells, our brains tell us to go to sleep at the wrong time. I hope this helps friends and family of narcoleptics understand.