I WAS reading an opinion piece mentioning about two troubling symptoms at a high place, which involves frequent “falling asleep during meetings with international counterparts and fainting spells.”
My knee-jerk reaction was trying to explain it with common sense plus some knowledge in medical science. Maybe the international meetings were just too boring not to fall asleep in; or perhaps consistently not sleeping at nighttime simply had resulted in severe anemia. Night owls can have that problem unless they are working night shifts in business process outsourcing companies, such as call centers.
My curiosity did prevail on me to check about these symptoms online.
Google brought me a 2008 health advice column by two physicians who responded to a reader’s query on similar symptoms: “This can happen… most embarrassingly, during meetings at work… and I become dizzy and disoriented.” The symptoms are all the same: Excessive sleepiness at daytime anywhere at inappropriate times and dizziness, which may result in fainting spells. In medical parlance, the symptoms are called hypersomnia. And Dr. Neil Stanley, one of the co-writers, suspected narcolepsy because hypersomnia is a classic sign of narcolepsy.
The term narcolepsy made me remember two popular movies. One was the late Robin Williams’ Patch Adams in 1998 and the late Dolphy’s Nobody, Nobody… But Juan in 2009. The coincidences are ironic. Both comedians have already passed and their movies were released a mere year apart. You may have to watch the movies again to find out where you can find narcolepsy.
A 2016 study by Rahman, Farook, Heyat, and Siddiqui and published in the International Advanced Research Journal in Science, Engineering, and Technology defined narcolepsy as a “sleep neurological sickness,” which according to Stanley, is genetic in origin.
However, physical signs must be carefully examined by a sleep specialist to generate a definite diagnosis.
Justin McFarlane Beau, however, had a different opinion about hypersomnia, or more specifically, sleeplessness. She connected it with certain ideas, saying: “Some people are married to ideas that they do not love, ideas that do not love them in return. They are married to ideas they do not sleep with, ideas that rob them of their sleep.”