Sleeping my life away

'You have narcoplepsy'
I wonder, too, if the depression and anger that complicated and soured relationships for most of my life were problems unto themselves or rooted in my indescribable weariness.

I do know this: After weighing years of what had been, against intimations of what might have been, I feel sad and oddly removed from major parts of my own life.

My high school grades were good enough to get me into the state university. When I mustered the discipline to attend classes, my lecture notes consisted of a few legible paragraphs followed by indecipherable scrawls that drifted off the page.

Joining 200 other students for a geology midterm, I awoke an hour later with no one left in the amphitheater but me and the scowling teacher. He snatched my exam and walked off shaking his head.

My grades were not swell. After two semesters, I slinked home in shame and went to work in a furniture factory. Through a haze of spray lacquer and sawdust, I got a quick glimpse of the rest of my life. So I saved as much as I could, and after a year returned to the university, chastened and determined.

This time I had a strategy: Take afternoon and evening classes, study subjects I loved, and study obsessively in odd hours of wakefulness. But I could not will myself to stay awake, even in my favorite cinema classes. When the lights went out, so did I. I caught the opening credits of “Birth of a Nation,” and “Citizen Kane,” along with an impressionist’s odd assortment of dimly glimpsed scenes. I had to see a movie twice to see it once all the way through.

On a date, I could be a laugh riot, and I’ll leave it at that.

Then came the night that I drove a Ford Falcon wagon straight off a dark, empty New Hampshire highway, my foot a dead weight on the accelerator. I roared down an embankment, tore down 350 feet of barbed-wire fence and ripped out the undercarriage on fieldstones.

I awoke to see the limb of an apple tree fill my headlights and made it to the floor just as the windshield blew straight into the back seat.

Somehow I stayed alive long enough, and learned enough, to attend the best journalism graduate school in the country and get a job at a fine daily newspaper.

News is all the time, so I could sleep for 14 hours and then do a full day’s work, or sleep for four hours and grab a nap at my desk. As long as I got the story, no one cared. For the first time in my life, my inclination to function without regard for the clock was not a handicap. Ah, those were the days. Or were they nights?

Occasionally, though, there were glitches.

One evening, I was assigned to watch a televised address by President Carter with a Brown University political scientist. We took comfortable seats in the newspaper’s editorial library, where mahogany panels and antique furnishings bespoke good breeding and gravity of thought.

The president spoke for about 20 minutes; I slept for 17.

The professor was gracious. He woke me to say what he thought of the speech and I wrote the story. Until it was in print and had withstood public scrutiny, I mentioned my untimely nap to no one.

Given the persistence of such episodes over the years, the results of the tests administered by Dr. Kawalick should not have been a surprise.

“You have narcolepsy,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

A remarkable difference
The overnight test had proved, as medical folks are inclined to say, “unremarkable.” The daytime test was anything but. Kawalick used unflattering words like “extreme,” “abnormal” and “pathologic.”

I had not merely fallen asleep in the middle of the day — more than once. I had skipped the first stage and plummeted straight into REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, the mysterious realm in which we dream. Most people take from 16 to 90 minutes to get there. Slackers! I needed an average of only 1.4 minutes.

Narcolepsy. I already knew a bit about it — that it is neither fatal (except when combined with heavy machinery) nor curable, but that it carries with it an annoyingly understandable lack of sympathy.

“Well, what now?” I asked the doctor.

Scientists had recently discovered that narcolepsy appears to be caused by the lack of a chemical neurotransmitter in the hypothalamus at the base of the brain. The scientists’ best guess is that it is destroyed by an attack on the immune system. The discovery has been hailed as the most significant step in the understanding of narcolepsy since 1877, when the disorder was first described in Germany. The hope is that by manipulating levels of chemicals, science some day may be able to cure narcolepsy.

But for now, Kawalick said, all one could do is try to control it. He prescribed modafanil, patented only months earlier by Cephalon Inc., and marketed as Provigil.

“It’s very effective,” Kawalick said. “It’s nonaddicting, and we see very few side effects.”

He also advised me to take a multivitamin and be ruthless about getting eight hours of sleep every night.

I followed the instructions, and the difference was remarkable. I no longer felt tired all the time. But with this new vitality came an acute awareness of just how much of a problem my narcolepsy had been, and for how long. I felt like a dunce for not having known. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one.

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