The cause of Narcolepsy 〜 consideration from my own experience

Saturday 31 August 2019

English

It was in my high school days when I got Narcolepsy. The clear cause of Narcolepsy remains to be seen, but in my case, there seemed to be two factors which caused the disease.

The first was stress coming from the death of my father in my junior high school days. He was in a vegetative state for more than 1 year, during which I started to have a dream where he appeared many times.  My sleeping habits became irregular and unstable.  It was the first death I experienced in my life and as he was the nearest to me, the shock was massive, which lead to stress.

The second was the impact of a soccer ball kicked from immediate distance. The next day of the accident, I felt some unfamiliar feeling on the brain, so I went to a hospital to find that blood came out from hypothalamus. When the doctor checked X-lay picture, he said that I might lose my sight in the worst case. But miraculously, the bleeding stopped in a few days. The doctor said how I was lucky. A few weeks later, however, I started to have a hallucination when I fell on sleep. It was so awful that I felt fear when I went to sleep.

So in my case, huge stress and the injury on the brain have caused Narcolepsy. When I attended a Narcolepsy patients' meeting,  I was surprised to hear that there were many who share the same causes with mine.