Unable to sleep one night, she picked up her laptop and tried again. She fed his symptoms into her searches, trying to find the combination that would turn up a similar story: long periods of sleeping feeling unreal, anxious, suspicious. Surely, her son was not the only one who had this - whatever it was. His mother had been doing her own online research. But these symptoms coming so long after he fully recovered suggested something worse, something permanent. He had hoped that the first two bouts were caused by an undetected infection. For the young man and his parents, this was the most terrifying episode. If he just got a good night’s rest, he told himself, he would feel better. And on Sunday morning, he felt the now-familiar headache and the fatigue that signaled the start of another bout of sleeping. Then, in June, he had a busy weekend with parties and friends. He did well and finished the year with high marks. He enrolled in a school half an hour away from his parents’ house and tried to pick up the life he had before all this started. With no treatment and no explanation.Īlthough relieved that he was finally over whatever he had, the young man was reluctant to go back to the university. He was a little slower, a little less outgoing, but he was back. And then, one day, the inexplicable fog he had been stuck in broke. He seemed to comfort himself by singing, belting out song lyrics - sometimes for hours. He was anxious, jumpy and oddly suspicious. He spent several weeks at home - still hazy and out of it. Perhaps he caught a virus that they didn’t test for. No one could tell them what he had, but he seemed to be getting better. When he was awake, there were glimpses of the son his parents knew. Toward the end of the second week in the hospital, the young man began to sleep less. Was his condition infectious? Genetic? Psychological? Nothing seemed to fit every time they thought of a possible diagnosis, testing ruled it out. And when he was awake, his mind and attention seemed elsewhere - though he couldn’t say where. Strangely, he slept through them all - sleeping up to 20 hours a day. He was seen by specialists in infectious diseases, neurology, gastroenterology and psychiatry. He had CT scans, ultrasounds and M.R.I.s. The young man was in the hospital for a total of nine days and had dozens of tests on his blood, urine and spinal fluid. He couldn’t remember anything in between. He recalled going to the orchard, but the next thing he knew, he was in the car, then in the hospital. And he wasn’t thinking right - yesterday seemed like a dream. He had migraines as a child, but this felt worse. A few days earlier, the patient reported, he got a terrible headache. When Dufort went to see him in the hospital the next day, he knew there was something seriously wrong. He ordered an electroencephalogram and other tests, which were all normal. Hearing about this strange behavior, the doctor instructed the mother to take her son to Children’s Minnesota, the pediatric hospital in St. He was the pediatrician who cared for her son since the day he was born. The young man was quiet on the drive home. The doctors replied that she should take him to his primary-care doctor in the next couple of days. Though the doctors weren’t sure what was going on, they felt that he wasn’t in danger and said he could go home.īut he is not O.K., the mother protested he had no history of mental illness or drug use. The young man had been there for a couple of hours, and he seemed a little more engaged. There was no evidence that drugs were involved. A head CT scan was normal so were the basic blood tests looking for signs of an electrolyte abnormality or infection. The doctors there had ordered tests but gotten no answers. She and her husband drove 90 minutes from their home near Minneapolis to meet them. Take him to the emergency room, the mother instructed. He had been a little out of it all morning, but suddenly he was totally gone - just standing in the orchard staring into space. But that morning, he felt well enough to go with her to pick apples. She told them that their son had been uncharacteristically quiet for a couple of days - he had a terrible headache. A high school friend, now at the university with him, had called them with a strange story. He was a freshman at the university there. “I don’t know what’s going on,” the 19-year-old exclaimed in a panicked voice as his parents entered the nearly deserted emergency room of a hospital in Eau Claire, Wis.
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