Postby Deb » Tue Feb 21, 2017 1:19 pm
I can’t say I had a disease but in case you are still trying (like I was) to work out what is wrong, when you KNOW something is wrong, my story may help. In my teens I developed a little problem which I can only call excessive sleepiness, to the extent that I saw doctors about it over the years, who all tested me and told me that there was nothing clinically wrong with me. But there had to be - I literally couldn’t stay seated for more than about twenty minutes without falling asleep as if drugged. It started in high school, falling asleep in reading periods and it got worse by the time I was at university. I fell asleep in exams at both school and uni, and at uni I fell asleep in every lecture so I stopped going and just borrowed notes from friends or studied from my text books.
I couldn’t drive for more than twenty minutes without putting myself in serious danger. Clearly, I was also a terrible passenger, famous for being no help at all on a long distance trip!
Dinner parties around a table were a torture, by about 9pm I was dropping off, there had to be a lot of laughter and alcohol involved to keep me awake!
I gave up trying to watch movies or tv. Office meetings were seriously embarrassing. Afternoons at my desk were seriously tricky as not even a walk around or a coffee brought me out of it.
I was utterly powerless when it took me over. It was like those moments before you go under when you have a general anaesthetic, you know, when you are counting down and your mind and body are powering down and you are helpless against it. That’s what it felt like.
The doctors didn’t have any answers for me, the standard statement was ‘there is nothing clinically wrong with you’ and I was otherwise physically all right. During my ‘awake times’ I was doing quite a bit of varied sport so it wasn’t a lack of energy unless I had already slumped into sleepiness, at which point I couldn’t move from the sofa. Finally when I was about thirty years old I was living in Auckland for a period and I met a doctor, just socially, she wasn’t practising, but she persuaded me to start taking a very high quality pharmaceutical grade multi vitamin/mineral supplement. Not actually for my sleepiness, but my brother had passed away a couple of years earlier from cancer and I was very interested in antioxidants and cancer protection and these supplements had it all. Anyway, I started on the supplements, very diligently, and about three months later did a road trip from Wellington to Auckland in a day. It took 9 hours – and I stayed awake the whole way! The whole way!! It was so lovely to appreciate the scenery for once! And it was only then that I realised that my problem had been some nutritional deficiency, I’m still not sure what. But nobody I had seen had every asked me about my diet, or thought to send me to a nutritionist.
So my point is perhaps if you have time to try it, as it’s a pretty lightweight easy solution, and you’d know within 3 months…try a top notch pharmaceutical grade supplement and be religious about it. I’m no longer on supplements but I have vastly improved my diet which wasn’t actually all that bad back then anyway – I was always one of those whole grain, low fat people – perhaps what was missing was the fat as I am now a healthy fat lover, along with the whole grain. Who knows!
I’m now a practising health coach and one of the other things I have learned a lot about over the past couple of years is the vital role of your gut bacteria in your health AND mental wellbeing. Around 90% of the serotonin in your body is manufactured and stored in your gut. Medicines decimate your colony of good bacteria so taking drugs for mood seems to me to be counter intuitive. PM me if you want some links on how to look after your gut, there is some great info out there. And I can throw some yummy nutritive recipes your way if you’d like.
If I don’t hear from you, hope it all comes right!
