Here’s a disease that kept me up at night when I heard about it…
So… you are living your life, a normal functioning adult, with a career and a family… and then you start to have trouble sleeping. You’re sleeping a little less all the time, taking progressively more meds to help. After several months, maybe a year, you literally cannot sleep. At all. Not a wink aside from chaotic snatches of semi-consciousness. Sleep aids and medications don’t help at all any more, but only increase the misery. The lack of sleep is killing you. You are becoming infinitely tired, and your entire body and mind are suffering exponential fatigue. And it’s getting worse…
There is an extremely rare genetic disorder called Fatal Familial Insomnia which shows up during a person’s middle adult life. It is a progressive insomnia that renders the affected person physically unable to sleep over the course of a year or two.
FFI is 100% fatal. There is no treatment because we don’t understand it.
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