by Amanda Gipson

Created on: February 05, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

I am narcoleptic, and it has taken me most of my life to get a diagnosis. Now I have that, and receive medication, my quality of life has improved beyond measure. This article focuses on my personal experience of just one of its symptoms, cataplexy, which I hope will be useful to others who think they might be experiencing it. I also offer some advice on how to get this difficult to diagnose condition recognized by your physician.

Cataplexy is one of the four main symptoms associated with the sleep disorder, narcolepsy. The other symptoms are excessive daytime sleepiness, sleep paralysis which may be accompanied by hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, and automatic behavior. Although it is at least as common as multiple sclerosis, narcolepsy is thought to be under-diagnosed, and many patients endure symptoms for over a decade before they can be successfully diagnosed and treated. The exact set of symptoms varies from one individual narcoleptic to another, both in severity and the order in which they appear. Cataplexy, however, is almost only associated with narcolepsy, and so it is a very useful way of distinguishing narcolepsy with other causes of fatigue.

My cataplexy started at the end of 2001, and I remember my first attack. I was with a university friend, and we were walking around the corridors of our university department, looking at posters in the hope of finding design ideas for one we needed to produce. As we looked, we were joking, and when I started to laugh, me knees buckled slightly each time. I didn't drop completely, but felt as if I must seem to be bobbing up and down, as my knees sagged and then recovered repeatedly. I felt embarrassed, but my friend didn't seem to notice.

As weeks went by, these kinds of attacks seemed to happen more often, and different muscle groups were becoming involved. At first it was my neck muscles, making me nod or drop my head onto my chest when laughing, then it was my jaw sagging, then my shoulders dropping. So it went on, getting worse all the time. The most common trigger was laughter, but early on, a sudden temper would cause cataplexy, too.

Physicians find it very difficult to diagnose cataplexy, and can misdiagnose it as fainting or even epilepsy. It is hard to explain what the attacks are like, and it is a condition that physicians do not hear about very often. Even sleep specialists may never have seen a cataplectic attack in real life, because in clinical conditions it is very difficult to provide the

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