Narcolepsy? Psychiatric disorders? Co-occuring or not?
I have Narcolepsy, but….
I also have anxiety, depression, bi-polar disorder, and if you ask my husband, I also have ADHD. I’m also a homeschool mom. That is a lot to deal with daily!
While I may not know any other homeschool mom's with Narcolepsy (though I am really hoping to find some through this blog), I know plenty of homeschool mom's with these various other disorders.
We all have our "stuff" that makes things harder for us, but we do it, and we will continue to do it, because we believe in taking back control of our children's education.
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Narcolepsy and Psychiatric Disorders: Comorbidities or Shared Pathophysiology?
I was diagnosed with Narcolepsy in 2012, so you would think it would be difficult for me to remember what things were like before I was diagnosed (us Narcoleptics having
memory issues and all.
Nope! I recall quite a lot, but while reading this article I realized it had been quite some time before I had really thought about my mental and social life as a child, a teenager, and even a few years into my early twenties. I was such a different person then. I was outgoing. I didn’t have anxiety. I did not struggle with depression. I was not tired all the time.
It’s hard to pin point an exact reason for my mental health declining. My entire family is full of depression, bi-polar, schizophrenia, and anxiety diagnoses. So, maybe I was destined to have multiple disorders. But I don’t think that is the whole picture.
I started dating a man who was 34 when I was 17. He was so anti -social, so mean, so emotionally and mentally degrading. Looking back, I can faintly see my digression as it happens. We were together for 10 years. We got married, had a couple of kids, and ten years in we couldn’t do it anymore. We spent the next 5 years in nasty divorce and custody battles. I still don’t think that is the entire picture, though we are getting warmer.
The only other exact point in time that I can really point to and say, wow, things really began to change noticeably, quickly and drastically, would be my car accident. I was T-boned in 2009 while pregnant with my second son. I had some nerve damage in my head, went through months of physical therapy, and then I was fine. I mean, not totally fine, I was on 3 different medications I took daily for the pain, as well as a couple other as needed medications for the migraines that began coming more and more often. I was also tired. All the time. I was always tired. I had no energy at all. Everyone around me seemed to believe I was just lazy and that I was making it out to be worse than it was.
So, after a while, I got tired of being tired and even more tired of the things I believed my friends and family were thinking. I began taking ephedrine and I began to feel more like my old self. It was great.
Then, ephedrine went off the market. I could no longer buy it at my local gas station, and I began to rapidly go downhill again. I needed to find something that would make me not be so tired. Something that would make me feel normal again. Bet you can guess where this is headed.
Yep, long story short, I began using meth and things began to go downhill in an entirely different way. After leaving my husband, I got clean, and then I was back to being tired all the time again, but I stayed clean anyway, and tired and awkward were just my life.
A couple of years after that, things began to get really, really bad. I was working at a school for children with special needs and I began randomly falling asleep. Now, I wasn’t just so tired that I had to go lay down or so something to range up. I was falling asleep before I even realized how tired I was.
It took 6 months after that to get an answer. The answer was Narcolepsy with Cataplexy. After a while of denial and bargaining, I accepted it for what it was.
It took a couple of years after that to figure out a medication and schedule regimen that worked for me, but here I am now, homeschooling two 5 year olds! I have my bad days. I definitely listen to my body and the people around me. They sometimes see things I don’t see, and can help me catch something and fix it before it becomes a real issue.
Well, that is my story, or at least part of it. I can’t wait to find out what this research points to and what it will mean for individuals with Narcolepsy.
If you're interested in reading the article discussing Narcolepsy occuring with various other psychiatric disorders and the theories as to why, please click the link below. I found it both intriguing and somehow comforting.
