Being a “sleeping beauty” isn’t always a fairytale.
A young nurse suffers from an extremely rare condition dubbed “sleeping beauty syndrome,” which has her sleeping for two weeks at a time.
Bella Andreou, 24, sleeps for over 20 hours a day and becomes a “zombie” during her episodes. She has had countless episodes that lasted weeks at a time since she was 17, but she only got her diagnosis in September.
“It’s often called Sleeping Beauty syndrome, which it really isn’t. It’s anything but Sleeping Beauty, it’s more like a nightmare,” Andreou told Kennedy News.
“You know when you have a nightmare where you fall off a cliff and then you can wake yourself up? Well for me that nightmare is constant for 10 days.”
“Sleeping beauty syndrome” — medically called Kleine-Levin syndrome (KLS) — causes intermittent episodes of sleeping for long periods of time, often 16-20 hours per day, according to Cleveland Clinic. The cause of KLS is still unknown.
“I’m a very independent person. I’m very bubbly and outgoing, but when an episode hits I become the complete opposite. I become very childlike. I talk like a baby and I’m needy,” the nurse from Newcastle upon Tyne, England, said.
“I’m very dazed. I can’t function because it’s like I’m in a dream. It’s just a dream that you don’t really wake up from.”
The only way she can get out of an episode is through a night of insomnia, she shared, and when she gets up the next morning, she feels fine. However, Andreou struggles with sleep because of the fear of not knowing whether she’ll wake up in the morning.
“Sleep for me is a huge issue,” she admitted.
The first time Andreou experienced an episode was in 2016 — on the same day as her first official drunken nigh as a teenager, leading her to assume that the 10-day period of brain fog and sleeping was nothing more than a hangover.
“I had this brain fog, derealisation, and I was in a dream-like state. I woke up and couldn’t stay awake. I slept for the majority of the day, more than 19 hours, and it lasted for 10 days,” she explained. “My parents were away at the time but they then came home and saw me and thought I’d been spiked, just because of how severe the symptoms seemed.”
Between the ages of 17 and 18, she would have seven- to 10-day-long episodes every four weeks. She alleged that her doctor at the time said she was just “doing it for attention,” but her parents would argue back saying that this wasn’t their daughter.
“I had never had any mental health issues before. And for them to just say it was behavioral was really hard because I wasn’t that sort of attention-seeking person,” Andreou said.
Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her and thought it could possibly be a reaction to her birth control pill.
“For a few months I was living with the fear that I was going mentally insane, thinking somebody was going to lock me up. I knew something was wrong with me – my parents described it as ‘the lights are on but nobody’s home,’” she said.
After months of scans and tests that ruled out tumors, cancer and epilepsy, she finally received an unofficial diagnosis of KLS from a neurologist in Newcastle.
Now Andreou is aware that her main triggers are alcohol, stress and hormones — which explains why her first episode came after attending a party.
Andreou said that she has lost nearly a year of her life due to the condition, having missed out on her 19th birthday and more recently having an episode while she was supposed to be a bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding.
“It was a very weird time because I lost a lot of friends. They didn’t understand it and they thought I was just being weird. It was a very scary chapter — the fear of the unknown,” she shared.
When Andreou first messaged her now fiancé on Instagram, she didn’t experience an episode in two years.
Andreou and Meg Stone, 25, had a long-distance relationship for six months before Andreou moved to Devon to live with Stone’s family — but the stress of the move triggered the condition, sending her into a 10-day sleep. This was the first of three episodes Stone witnessed herself.
“I just miss her when she’s in an episode. It’s a weird situation because I miss her yet she’s right there, but she’s just not,” Stone said. “She’s like a ghost. She doesn’t really know what’s going on. Her eyes are open but you can see straight through them.”
Stone, an engineer, sometimes takes time off work to take care of Bella during an episode, periodically waking her up to make sure she eats and drinks.
“As soon as she’s out of the episode she feels very guilty because she says I don’t deserve to be in a relationship where she’s ill,” Stone shared. “It makes me feel upset because I don’t ever want her to feel like that. I reassure her all the time that I don’t care if a plan has to be canceled because I’d rather be with her and make sure she’s okay.”
After Andreou’s most recent episode, Stone took to TikTok to help raise awareness for KLS and seek advice.
“It was almost a cry for help. I had taken her to A&E and they would just look at us as if we’re stupid – as if there’s nothing wrong with her. No one had a clue about KLS and it was ridiculous,” Stone said. “KLS can happen in an instant and all of a sudden your life just changes – which is what happened with Bella. It was just completely out of the blue.”
Andreou added, “I just wish people would understand and not make jokes about me sleeping all day. I wish I did just sleep all day and that was it.”
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