Real Life Sleeping Beauty, Fell Asleep On The Sofa One Day And Didn’t Wake Up For Six Months
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Have you ever heard about sleeping beauty syndrome aka Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS), But that fairy-tale name is far from the grim reality faced by those youngsters who are sleeping through the most formative times of their lives. What is known is that it mainly hits teenagers — the average age it strikes is 16 — and lasts around 13 years, destroying young people’s hopes of passing exams, going to university or forging a career.
Beth Goodier, 22, fell asleep in November five years ago and did not wake up properly for six months By rights, Beth Goodier should have finished university by now and started her training as a child psychologist. With a string of impressive exam results as well as a confident, outgoing personality, she was a young woman who had every reason to believe she had a bright future ahead of her.
But on her 17th birthday in November five years ago, Beth fell asleep and did not wake up properly for six months. For 22 hours a day, she kept sleeping, only waking in a dream like trance to take a little food and drink and go to the toilet. Over the past five years, Beth’s mother, Janine, calculates that her daughter has been asleep 75% of the time.
Beth, now 22, is one of more than 100 young people in Britain diagnosed with Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS) – known as Sleeping Beauty syndrome. At the moment, Beth is two-and-a half months into another deep sleep episode. Nothing – not drugs, loud noises, pleading or cajoling – will wake her. So her life is spent in pyjamas in bed or asleep on the sofa. On the rare occasions she leaves her home in Stockport, Cheshire, to see a doctor, she must be pushed in a wheelchair because she is too tired to walk.
‘It is like night and day,’ says Janine, 48. ‘She might wake up tomorrow and then it’s a race against time to live the life she should have had. She rushes off to catch up with her friends and get her hair done. But no one knows when she might fall asleep again.’
Beth first started feeling exhausted as a 16-year-old and Janine assumed it was normal teenage torpor. Then, one evening, Beth fell asleep on the couch and wouldn’t wake up. When Janine tried to rouse her, she was horrified when Beth could only babble incoherently in the voice of a five-year-old. Naturally, her mother assumed the worse: that she had a brain tumour or haemorrhage, and Beth was rushed to hospital. But all tests drew a blank.
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