From the diagnosis to the triggers of cataplexy, author and activist Julie Flygare shares her experience with narcolepsy in an ATTN report.
But being tired is just a normal part of college experience right?
That’s what 32-year-old Julie Flygare, the author of a narcolepsy memoir “Wide Awake and Dreaming,” initially thought when she was attending law school in Boston. However, it turned out to be something much more serious: narcolepsy.
“I was really just thinking that every college student is tired, never really taking it seriously, until it got so much worse in my first year of law school.”
Flygare started Boston College Law School in 2006, but she started having trouble staying awake and focusing on her school work. Her grades started to slip, something she never had a problem with in the past. She blamed her herself for her lack of “will power.”
“I felt that I just somehow lost that will power and didn’t think that sleep was necessarily the problem, because narcolepsy is just so much more invisible than people perceive it to be and just so much more subtle. I kind of thought it was an energy and motivational issue.”
