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A teenage girl from the United States has been called the living version of Sleeping Beauty. Nicole Delien is a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from a rare disorder that sees here needing to sleep for up to eight weeks or two months at a time.
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Nicole Delien
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Her sleeping habits are so extreme that once, she slept for 64 days straight which meant she missed both the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. During her bouts with the disorder she only wakes up to eat her meals. When she awakens from her long slumber, she has no recollection or sense of time. She does not know how long she has been out.
She suffers from the condition known as Kleine-Levin Syndrome. It is also called the Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. Being saddled with this disorder means that Nicole has to sleep for 17 or 18 hours a day. She was first diagnosed as having the condition when she was an eight-year-old child.
She has Kleine-Levin Syndrome
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Before she could be properly diagnosed, she saw various doctors. They all struggled to pinpoint what was wrong with her, with one doctor claiming that it was something Nicole was doing “for attention.” It took twenty-five months before she was given a definite diagnosis. This condition is so rare that it only affects a total of 1,000 individuals worldwide, which probably contributes to the fact that not many doctors are able to accurately diagnose its symptoms.
When a bout of this disease is about to set in, the sufferer becomes progressively drowsy. Thereafter, the patient then sleeps for hours or days straight. They awaken to eat and use the bathroom, but they are in a daze. It is almost like a sleepwalking-type consciousness. When they are awake, they are apathetic and disoriented.
Nicole has slept for 34 to 64 days straight—like a real-life version of Sleeping Beauty we read on children’s books—only awakening to eat. Her family says that they have to treat her carefully when she does fully awaken because it upsets her to realize that she has missed important days and holidays like Christmas.
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There is no known cure for this bizarre illness. It has been described by medical experts as something of a cross between narcolepsy and epilepsy. Nicole has been able to limit her episodes to twice a year because she takes a combination of medicine that is normally for epileptic and narcoleptic patients.
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