HBM084: Are You Sure You're Awake?
Here Be Monsters
Here Be Monsters Podcast
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2017
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chrissy was having trouble remembering who she was when she woke up. First she thought it was early-onset dementia, then she thought it was schizophrenia. She had recurring hallucinations about being stalked by a beast that would talk to her while she slept.
Content note: language
A doctor eventually told her she was waking up frequently throughout the night, some 30+ times per hour. It was this inability to maintain a regular sleep cycle that helped her get a diagnosis of narcolepsy, explaining Chrissy’s excessive sleepiness, hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and sometimes episodes of cataplexy (sudden loss of muscle control after having a strong emotional response).
Chrissy’s diagnoses frightened her. She tried to pretend it wasn’t true. This attitude drastically changed one day when she woke up in traffic, driving 100kph with her kids in the back seat. She finally accepted her illness, recognized it as a beast, and looked for ways to feed it that wouldn’t affect her children. She says that’s the only way it’s won—if it gets her kids.
This episode was produced by Bec Fary. Bec is a freelance audio producer and creator of the podcast Sleep Talker. Bec’s show is about sleep, dreams, and nightmares, and she’s covered narcolepsy before. That’s how Chrissy got in touch with Bec to share her story. If you have a story you want to share with us, get in touch.
This episode was edited by Bethany Denton and Jeff Emtman. Our editor at KCRW is Nick White.
Music: Phantom Fauna, The Black Spot
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW, this is here be monsters. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm sorry if I'm about to use bad language. |
| 0:12.0 | I just haven't had a day like this for a long time. |
| 0:17.0 | I just snapped at my nearly three-year-old because he wanted a drink of water. |
| 0:28.0 | Like it's, you just have no patience. |
| 0:47.7 | You have no patience at all. Everything makes you really angry. You get angry because of the way you're feeling, the pain that you get you get. You can't think. I'd like it's just every second of every day has to be planned around this stupid fucking illness. |
| 0:59.0 | You know what you used to be like. You can remember it like it was yesterday, just living life, being able to leave the house and not think, |
| 1:07.6 | do I have my medication, do I have something in the car and because I fall asleep? |
| 1:16.8 | Surely there's something that I can do to stop it. I wasn't born with it. It just seemed so freaking unfair. |
| 1:26.0 | I know life never turns out the way that you planned, but |
| 1:32.0 | it just feels like I mean a glass jar with a lid on nobody can hear me. |
| 1:39.0 | No one can hear me. |
| 1:42.0 | But I'll be fine tomorrow. No one can hear me. |
| 1:45.0 | But I'll be fine tomorrow. I would have swallowed all these emotions down before I have a cataplexi. |
| 1:49.0 | I can feel it now. I get really tired when I get upset. |
| 1:57.0 | And I forget what I was crying about. |
| 2:08.5 | Everything just goes. |
| 2:10.0 | Where to put my phone down before I drop it? Here be monsters, the podcast about, no one's telling us to be awake. The podcast about the unknown. Why can I hear a baby? |
| 2:54.0 | That baby is really loud. |
| 3:00.0 | Can someone please tend to their baby? |
| 3:05.0 | And then I'm like, I had a baby. I had a baby. |
| 3:19.0 | And then opened my eyes and realized that was my baby. |
... |
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