I have been a worrier my entire life. Even when I was a little girl, I would obsess over the most stupid things. For instance, I read this book when I was 8, explaining how you can get different illnesses. It freaked me out like nothing before. Whenever I would cut myself or scraped my knee, I would imagine that all those bacteria were inside me and that I was going to develop sepsis or whatever. Things only got worse as I grew up and as I learned new stuff about different illnesses and things about the human body.

For a while I thought I was suffering from a syndrome I cannot even recall now. It took quite a few visits to the psychiatrist to convince me that I was simply anxious and a bit of a hypochondriac. And the worst thing that could happen to a hypochondriac is that actually something happens. That is when you go all mental and start imagining stuff that is way worse than what is actually wrong with you.
To cut a long story short, I started suffering from narcolepsy when I was about 16, at the worst possible time. I didn’t have the experience and knowledge I have now, but with all the hypochondriac obsessions.

The first thing I noticed was that I was getting sleepy all the time. And I mean all the time. I would wake up and then, an hour later I couldn’t hold my head up straight. It was enough cause for alarm, but the next thing that happened nearly made me scream in panic.
Namely, one day, I was waking up and I had this hallucination that was so scary I don’t like thinking about it now, ten years later. It was so vivid and so scary that I was convinced I was going crazy. I knew it wasn’t a dream, but it was still like the worst nightmare you can imagine. I told my parents that I was going crazy and that I should visit a psychiatrist. They knew that the only way I would calm down would be to actually take me to the psychiatrist. So, we went.

He told me that it was most probably narcolepsy, but he sent me to a specialist who confirmed the psychiatrist’s suspicions. I had narcolepsy. First of all, I was so happy I was not going crazy, and I was so happy that there is a medication that actually works for narcolepsy. The doctor prescribed Ritalin and I started taking it religiously. After no more than a week or two, I started feeling my old again. No symptoms of narcolepsy, but even Ritalin couldn’t help me with my hypochondria.