extra credit blog- my sleeping disorder

Freshman year of highschool I started to get tired more than usual. After awhile, all I was doing was sleeping. No matter if I was at school, home, or anywhere else, and no matter how much sleep I got, it was never enough. It became impossible for me to stay awake for more than an hour at a time before I'd feel the need to sleep again. I would have sleep fits during every class where the extreme tiredness came over me. I'd try my hardest to stay awake and pay attention, but I never won. I would normally only pass out for a couple seconds up to a minute and then I'd somewhow snap out of it myself, or a teacher would wake me up, which made me feel pretty embarassed. My parents brought me to doctors in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but no matter how many tests were peformed on me or how much blood was drawn, none of the doctors could give us an explanation on what was wrong with me. We all started to worry, espeically my parents who feared I had a rarer disease that could possibly kill me, but they couldn't know for sure. Finally someone recommended that I go to a sleep hospital in the cities. So we decided that we might as well give it a try. We went, and after staying there for a day and night, and all the tests that were performed on me, they concluded that I had Narcolepsy. Narcolepsy neither has a known cause nor a cure. The only thing doctors do know about it is what it's symptoms are and that medication can help a person deal with it. I was put on riddelin first, but like many people say, Riddelin made me almost zombie-like. I wasn't feeling any less tired, and found myself zoning out more often. Since I had to visit my sleep doctor every few months, I waited until my appointment to talk to her about it. She then put me on Adderall. Since then I've noticed a big difference from the medication and it defiantly helps me stay awake. It sucks because I'll have this for the rest of my life and I don't even know what caused me to get this in the first place. I'l always struggle with it because I'm always going to need more sleep than most people in order to function. But I'm doing good and as more and more time goes by, I get more used to dealing with it.