Hello, everyone. I am Masa, an ordinary Japanese school teacher suffering from Narcolepsy. Now coronavirus has been rampant all over Japan. As my school has been shut down in response to the Prime Minister Mr. Abe's demand, now I've gotten time to write this.
Today, I want to tell you how to check whether your symptoms are Narcolespy or not. I am not a doctor, but the patient myself, so this is based on my own experience.
The name of Narcolepsy has started to gain recognition in society little by little, so I hear there are some people who suspect themselves of Narcolepsy. The problem for suspected patients is that it takes time to identify the disease, and is not easy to find the specified doctors. Here, I enumerate some criteria for Narcolepsy.
At first, the age of the onset of Narcolepsy is concentrated on teenagers. I myself started the typical symptoms when I was 17 years old.
The typical symptoms are
① Cataplexy, a sudden loss of muscle
② Hallucinations at sleep onset and disturbed nighttime sleep
③ Excessive daytime sleepness
The first symptom for me to make me realise something different was hallucinations. Several days after an injury of the brain, I started to have hallucinations. The dream was so vivid and awful, like the scene where someone was entering my room and tried to stub me with a long nife many times, or the moment I was killed in the traffic accident, that I started to feel terrified of sleeping alone in the darkroom. The next sign was cataplexy. I was going to school by train. One day, while I was standing on the train, the moment I fell asleep, I found my knees hit strongly the door of the train, as my feet have lost the power so suddenly. Then I woke up, but I repeated the same action after that many times. Next, when I was about to laugh at a joke on a TV show, I found myself loose my power to sustain my body and fell down. Because of these symptoms, I was told to go to the hospital and was proved to be Narcolepsy.
The above three main symptoms, however, do not always appear. There is another type of Narcolepsy, which doesn't cause cataplexy. So, if you suspect it, the best way is to consult doctors.
Looking back at my case, I was happy, as I knew that my symptoms were from Narcolepsy by taking the university checkup. As I lived in the center of Tokyo, I was immediately able to see the doctor, an authority of Narcolepsy.
To ascertain Narcolepsy, you have to sleep overnight at a hospital wearing many tubes measuring brain waves and movements of legs and hands. The special engineers keep watching the monitor whole night and sometimes come to attach the tubes correctly. In addition to such hard examination, a blood test is also conducted, as more than 99 % of the Narcolepsy patients are known to have HLA, a certain type of white blood cell. Also, checking the concentration of Orexin in the spinal also becomes solid evidence of Narcolepsy. I hear taking blood from around the spinal is quite painful.
I know many people who ended up finding their name of the disease more than ten years after the onset. If only they had found their own disease earlier! They had really had a hart time. I pray that all suspected patients suffering from Narcolepsy could pinpoint the disease as soon as possible.
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