A Real-Life Sleeping Beauty

Yes, she’s real – and no, she doesn’t live with the seven dwarfs. She is a real-live sleeping beauty that often sleeps for days at a time. Currently, the most days she has slept in a row is 13, and there is no cure in sight. What is a poisoned apple that caused her to receive this condition? Perhaps not, but scientists will be the first to tell you that they haven’t yet found out what has. Louisa Ball, a 15-year-old British girl, suffers from a rare condition known in the medical world as Kleine-Levin Syndrome. It’s also known as Sleeping Beauty Sickness for reasons you will soon understand.

She first showed signs of the disorder in October of 2008. After recovering from the flu she would sleep for days on end. Each day her parents would wake her to eat and go to the bathroom, but off she would go back to a deep sleep again. Concerned for her health, her parents took her to several doctors before finally discovering her daughter suffered from Kleine-Levin Syndrome.

Sleeping Beauty Sickness

While it might sound like just a deep depression to some it’s actually a disorder that’s deeply rooted inside of the brain, causing the patient’s sleep switch to remain off for hours, days, or weeks on end. During this time the patient talks in their sleep and can become aggressive with anyone who tries to disturb their sleep. In a sense, it’s almost as if a hibernation switch is triggered, rendering the victim into an unconscious state.

Unlike narcolepsy, which is a chronic condition, Kleine-Levin Syndrome is episodic in nature, allowing the sufferer to lead a normal life between events. It’s the unpredictability of the condition that makes it so difficult for its victims, as they are unaware when they are about to relapse.

Doctors have done their best to understand the disorder, and they believe it might be an auto-immune syndrome; however, they are no closer to proving this than they are curing it. For now, the best they can do is prescribe medications that interrupt the sleep pattern, disallowing the patient to properly fall asleep. By interrupting the stages to deep sleep the medications seem to break the cycle, but this often causes the patient to suffer from irritability and cognitive abnormalities. While they become closer to the waking world, a piece of them remains behind with Morpheus.

The Only Cure Is Time

The condition typically lasts for 8 to 12 years and then disappears as quickly as it came on. Unlike many disorders that occur mainly in later life, KLS (Kleine-Levin Syndrome) occurs mainly in children and young adults, favoring boys over girls at a near 3:1 ratio.

As this is an episodic condition, those suffering from it find the condition to be very debilitating. It can interfere with school, with work, operating a motor vehicle, or any other facet of normal life. For this reason alone, many diagnosed patients find themselves dependent on caregivers to watch over them, in case the symptoms return.

While many of us wouldn’t mind a few extra hours of sleep at night, the thought of uncontrollably falling asleep for days on end should be enough to make this condition unwanted by any of us. Thankfully, the condition is far better understood by doctors now, making diagnosis a bit easier than it was in its early stages, when it was often misdiagnosed as acute depression, an acute attention seeking disorder, or a hormonal imbalance.

If you or a loved one find themselves falling into a deep sleep for 20 or more hours at a time then it’s possible KLS is the condition being experienced. Just be certain that you aren’t confusing this syndrome with extreme tiredness brought on by days of sleep apnea.