Who Ordered a Sleep Disorder?

A couple of months ago, my daughter started falling asleep in class. We noticed her grades were slipping. Her mornings got weird, with her nearly impossible to wake up. She slept in the car on the way to school, in class, in the car on the way back, on the couch before supper, in her chair at supper, on the couch after supper, in the shower . . . she was sleeping anywhere from 12 to 16 hours a day.

She started missing school. First she missed morning classes. Soon, she missed entire days. Finally, she missed three days in a row. Asleep.

Besides sleeping all day, she was gaining weight. A lot of weight. She was depressed. She was irritable. And sometimes, she was out of her mind. Her mother woke her one morning and she started screaming. She flailed around then stopped, for an instant, and stared at us like we'd just appeared out of thin air and cried out What is going on?! Then she wept. We realized that she wasn't actually awake until that instant before she asked what was going on.

We took her to an endocrinologist who did a full mark-up and found nothing. No reason for her to gain weight, no anomalies that might point to excessive sleeping. We took her to a psychologist who said she was depressed but offered no cure. We took her to her psychiatrist who, finally, a woman of excessive intelligence, suggested a sleep specialist.

The sleep doctor gave us a couple of tools to measure her sleep patterns. The result was insane. Sarah had a 'free running sleep delay'. Her natural onset of sleep was being delayed two hours every night. This resulted in her natural sleep schedule of 7 hours a night to occasionally bump up against itself and double up. It seemed random but it wasn't. On a chart, it looked like a spiral.

This disorder screws up a kid's circadian rhythm, the natural alignment of the body clock with daytime hours. Her body literally didn't know what time it was. It was running blind.

She also has sleep apnea from some kind of obstructive aspect of her throat. Though she is unconscious, she is not actually sleeping. In the lab, they said she woke up 17 times every hour and was getting less than 2 hours of real sleep every night.

This two problems combined to throw a bunch of her body-clock dependent processes off schedule or shut them down. She was irritable because she wasn't getting any sleep. She occasionally woke up crazy because she wasn't actually waking up. She was gaining weight because her body couldn't get all of it's maintenance done while she was unconscious but not asleep. She was depressed because she rarely saw daylight.

As of this article, Sarah has withdrawn from the Super Hero High School she was attending, one of the top 5 high schools in the nation and is working via correspondence. She is trying to use a CPAP machine but keeps ripping the mask off in the middle of the night. We haven't been able to realign her circadian schedule and as I type at 5pm on a Sunday, she's been 'asleep' since last night at 9:30.

I know most of my posts are supposed to be funny, but this blog is about parenting first and poop jokes second. Being a good parent is incredibly difficult and recognizing then fixing the myriad problems teenagers can face is hard. When a problem seems to originate from the eldritch imagination of a horror writer, it can be terrifying.

This article is the first in a series following our efforts to cure Sarah of this sleep disorder and get her back into school and in shape and sane by September. It also will serve as a means to educate other parents and commiserate with them about this wild card teen issue. I know, I know, regular readers are all throwing their hands in the air and wondering: yo, Chris, where are the fart jokes? They're here, they're in the other parts of the website. And know this, throughout this ordeal, Sarah is performing splendidly, accepting this issue philosophically, and most important, the most telling indication of what a remarkable and rare person she is: with a sense of humor.