She doesn’t sleep, she hibernates.
A UK woman has dubbed herself a “real-life Sleeping Beauty” due to her unusual condition, which causes her to sleep up to 22 hours a day.
“I can’t be woken up once I’m asleep,” Joanna Cox, 38, told SWNS of her unusual condition. “I wake up not knowing what day it is or how long I’ve been asleep for.”
She added, “It’s honestly ruining my life — I’m like a real-life Sleeping Beauty.”
The Castleford resident suffers from idiopathic hypersomnia, a rare sleep disorder that causes the sufferer “to be very sleepy during the day even after a full night of good sleep,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
“It also often causes difficulty waking up after you’ve been asleep,” they write. “If you take a nap, you generally don’t feel refreshed and you may wake up confused and disoriented.”
Due to her condition, Cox says she never “feels rested” despite sleeping between 18 and 22 hours per day. “It’s really upsetting when people just say I’m ‘lazy’ or need to set more alarms,” she said.
The human hibernator first noticed something was awry in 2017 after she felt preternaturally tired at all times and couldn’t get through the day without a nap. “It started out of nowhere — nothing triggered it, I just felt really tired,” lamented the Brit, who owned a cleaning company at the time.
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Cox eventually found herself falling asleep in unusual places, such as behind the wheel, which resulted in her giving up driving altogether.
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The big sleeper even recalled a time when she dozed off during a night out. “Before I was diagnosed, I fell asleep in a booth in a club on a night out,” the mother of two lamented. “The bouncer thought I was just drunk and kicked me out — it was so embarrassing.”
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Hoping to get to the bottom of her fatigue, the consummate slumberer reported to the doctor, who misdiagnosed her with depression. However, medics quickly ruled that out as Cox didn’t exhibit any other symptoms besides tiredness.
This kicked off a years-long saga of fruitless doctor’s visits with medics incorrectly claiming she had everything from infections to cancer.
Finally, in October 2021, doctors referred Cox to a sleep clinic at Pontefract Hospital in Yorkshire, where doctors revealed that she had idiopathic hypersomnia.
Unfortunately, the cause of the condition is yet unknown, meaning there is no existing cure. Not to mention that she’s tried dozens of so-called treatments but to no avail.
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