Sleeping Beauty.

Imagine a life where sleep is that best friend you love to hate. A life where you are constantly falling asleep in the most random times and places! Well this is what pretty much occurs when narcolepsy is present. I can still recall the times my friends and i would mimic the behavior when listening to a boring story or lecture in class, you know that head wobbling and fake snoring that would take your mind off things. We were so ignorant to the fact that this a struggle many Americans live with. To be honest, this disorder is to wickedly crazy! The capacity for our one body to have no control over our sleep cycle can seem quite frustrating and I will never know what it feels to be in that situations, but here are some facts that might help understand narcolepsy more: 

According to WedMed, "Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder that affects the control of sleep and wakefulness. People with narcolepsy experience excessive daytime sleepiness and intermittent, uncontrollable episodes of falling asleep during the daytime. These sudden sleep attacks may occur during any type of activity at any time of the day."

The book stated because the body lacks orexin, the chemical that helps us stay awake. But, in order to understand the basics of narcolepsy it is important to understand the difference between "normal sleep" and living with narcolepsy. Sleep happens in cycles. When we fall asleep, we initially enter a light stage of sleep and then progress into increasingly deeper stages. Both light and deep sleep stages are called non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. After about 90 minutes, we enter the first stage of REM sleep, which is the dreaming portion of sleep, and throughout the night we alternate between stages of REM and non-REM sleep. For people with narcolepsy, sleep begins almost immediately with REM sleep and fragments of REM occur involuntarily throughout the waking hours. When you consider that during REM sleep our muscles are paralyzed and dreaming occurs, it is not surprising that narcolepsy is associated with paralysis, hallucinations, and other dream-like and dramatically debilitating symptoms (National Sleep Foundation). 

Symptoms also  include: 

1. Gradual or sudden attacks of sleepiness during the day.

2. Occasional cataplexy—an attack of muscle weakness while the person remains awake. Cataplexy is often triggered by strong emotions, such as anger or great excitement. (One man suddenly collapsed during his own wedding ceremony.)

3. Sleep paralysis—an inability to move while falling asleep or waking up. Other people may experience sleep paralysis occasionally, but people with narcolepsy experience it more frequently.

4. Hypnagogic hallucinations—dreamlike experiences that the person has trouble distinguishing from reality, often occurring at the onset of sleep. (Text also found in Book)

Treatment: Thank God! There is a way to control it. Medications that doctors are typically prescribe stimulants are to improve alertness and diminish excessive daytime sleepiness. Antidepressants are also often used to treat cataplexy, hypnagogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. 

This is a very radical disorder and we must learn not to fall into conclusions about the people it affects. This disorder is considered a taboo in other countries and people are often seen as "lazy bums". Lets make this lovely "sleeping beauties" feel understood and aware that they are not alone. 

(video consist of three parts feel free to check part one and three if time allows it) 

Mothers take note.

We are have an idea of how happy our first child will change our lives, you know that typical "aww i wonder how he/she is going to look like?" and of course the answers are bias because at the end we want to imprint them with some of our "good" characteristics. But what is if told you that your baby was going to have a birth defect? Would you be as excited as you would be with a healthy one? And what if i told you that you could've prevented you baby from being a male but acting like a girl?
We all have come across those guys that act...well.. feminine, and at often times we wonder if they are gay. I recently made a new friend a month back and I sometimes wonder is he is gay, not that i am stereotyping him, but they are certain characteristics that make me doubt his sexual orientation.
For example, he usually gets excited the way we girls would, you know that high pitched' "Oh my God, ahhhh" phrase and his hand gestures are way to feminine. I was even to confused that i got the courage to ask him, he totally denied it and i felt to awful to have assumed such thing. But after reading the assigned modules, a light bulbed just clicked and understood why, he was so in touch with his feminine side.

According to the book, "drugs that tend to femi- nize or demasculinize early development include alcohol, marijuana, haloperidol (an antipsychotic drug), phthalates (chemicals common in many manufactured products), and cocaine. 

Still with this, i didn't really comprehend why he might act a certain way because it stated early development not adolescence. It wasn't until months later where he later confessed that his mother had been using cocaine and alcohol while she was pregnant!  But then i was puzzled again, i know, geez. get to the point. My friend was a hard cocaine and mariguana addict since he was 13, we all know that puberty is one of the main phases of or life that is happening, thus causing hormones like testosterone to do what...well you know what its meant to do, masculinize the male. A part of me also thinks, that because of this he might of not obtain the full effect of testosterone in his development 

I tired finding a video that would explain the phenomenon but there is very little research. instead this video targets the affects of drugs on a baby. We are the voice of the next generation that can't speak for themselves. I never told my friend he was just too "feminine" but its amazing to see how the affects of him also being dependent are seen. 

The Art of Smell

Ok. Lets get real here, we all have the one perfume or cologne that reminds us about the special loved one, that ex boyfriend/girlfriend that was dumb to leave us or we were smart to dumb, or an old friend you wish you still talked to. That little pause that we take when we smell that familiar smell and we have a mini flashback. Isn't is amazing in how our olfactory cells send those signals to our brain and it becomes part of who we are, and takes a special place (no its not our heart) in our memory. I still remember how my high school crush smells like, and every time I come around another person wearing the Abercrombie & Fitch Fierce cologne I get reminded of him (not such a good thing because a lot of guys where it nowadays). But yes, I myself created a special meaning to that certain smell and now i can differentiate it from others. We never put to much important to our olfaction, because it is part of who we are and and the end of its our noses job to smell, and in most instances even taste. Thats why when we were little and got sick our moms would make us drink the awful medicine that made us want to throw up,  and we would shut our noses to minimize the taste. I don't know about you, but this topic is sooooo interesting, I mean think about it! The smell of our moms cooking, the smell of rain, and the smell of our favorite fragrance all come together to interact with the social and interpersonal aspect of our selfs. 


We have these awesome olfactory receptors that have to decode the smell to be process by our brain. We have hundreds of them and they are all work similar to the G protein ( making connections between each other to carry a signal). Then these signals find their way though the olfactory bulbs to its target cell and from there the magic happens where the smell is distinguished because it is transported to the olfactory area in the brain in the cerebral cortex. 

What really intrigues me, is the concept that we all have out own unique sense of smell. What might seem pleasant to me might not to you or  vise versa. This come to show me that out sense of smell and brain work together to also provide a deeper and more complex reason why we are attracted or not to certain smells. For example I used to have iron deficiency when i was younger and my mom would make me eat beets, now every time i smell them i get disgusted, due to the fact that i associated it with a bad experience:) 

But here is a personal advice when you are face with an unpleasant smell: smell coffee! it filters you olfactory receptors. 

Where are you from?

I will never forget Mr. Lopez, he was by far the sweetest and kind man at the nursing home where i was doing my hours. I was so surprised that someone started a conversation with me, he started telling me tales about his childhood and how he came to America, and if anyone knows me well i absolutely love to hear the older generation share their wisdom. He ask me where i was from and continued to tell me his story. Then, after five minutes he asked me where i was from again, puzzled i told him, "Donna"? I didn't think to much of it because i mean, we sometimes forget that when we meet a new person so i just thought he didn't really catch it the first time. Ten minutes later he asked me again, and I just smiled and said, "Donna Mr. Lopez". Ok, by this time I knew something was up, and asked Rene the COTA why he asked me the same question twice, he said he has amnesia and was not able to store new information. "Oooohh!! no wonder he kept asking me for the same thing over and over again", I said. But he seemed so normal, going about his daily therapy treatment, smiling to the staff, and even starting a normal conversation with a total stranger, me! Mr. Lopez was able to familiarize with the rehab staff, since he saw them everyday, and of course his case wasn't so server as Drew Barrymore in the movie 50 First Dates and Rachel McAdams in The Vow. But he did show signs of disorientation of what day it was, the time, and questioned if he had eaten lunch. 

Anterograde amnesia is a selective memory deficit, resulting from brain injury, in which the individual is severely impaired in learning new information. Memories for events that occurred before the injury may be largely spared, but events that occurred since the injury may be lost. In practice, this means that an individual with amnesia may have good memory for childhood and for the years before the injury, but may remember little or nothing from the years since. Short-term memory is generally spared, which means that the individual may be able to carry on a conversation; but as soon as he is distracted, the memory of the conversation fades. 

Usually people with anterograde amnesia lose declarative memory (the recollection of facts), but they retain non-declarative, or procedural, memory (the learning of skills and habits). For instance, they may be able to remember or learn how to do things, such as talking on the phone or riding a bicycle, but they may not remember what they had eaten for lunch earlier that day. This is because procedural memory does not rely on the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe memory system in the same way as declarative memory

This type of amnesia us pretty quite phenomenal, I never imaged carrying a conversation with some one with a short term memory lost, but able to recall detail facts of his childhood. It is something worth exposing yourself to, teaches a professional to be compassionate and patient. 

Wernicke's Aphasia

It crazy to believe that six weeks ago i didn't know what Wernicke's Aphasia was. I wish I had some kind of  knowledge about it before i did my observation hours this summer, I would've had a better understanding of what Mrs. Gomez (named changed) was going through.
I few weeks ago i noticed this sweet old woman going about her daily occupational treatments, she was taking by herself and folding the sheets. I tried to conversant with her but she wouldn't make sense, puzzled, I asked the COTA what was wrong with her. He smirked and said, "what did she tell you"? I said well, "Nothing really, she kept repeating what she was doing". He told me she had Wernicke's Aphasia, he even offered to show me how this disorder took place in a her life. He politely asked Mrs. Gomez what was she holding, she kept repeating the same thing. He asked again, "What do you use this for?" And she just kept on saying," Yes, Yes, thats right". The COTA assured me that she can't describe objects and she likes to divert from the subject to hide her disorder. 

WERNICKE'S APHASIA: 
Wernickes aphasia is a language disorder that impacts language comprehension and the production of meaningful language. The disorder is related to damage to the Wernicke's area. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia have difficulty understanding spoken language, but are able to produce sounds, phrases, and word sequences. While these utterances have the same rhythm as normal speech. They are not language because no information is conveyed. 

TREATMENT:
The main cause of aphasia must be stabilized or treated. To regain the normal language function, speech therapy must begin right after the injury. Even though there are no surgical or medical procedures available currently to treat this disorder, aphasia resulting from head injury or stroke can improve by implementing speech therapy. However, for most patients, the primary aim is focused on making use of the retained language abilities. Being aware on how to go about this disorder is extremely important because it is then, where we can see the most positive changes. Although, for late adult hood it become a bit more difficult because their capability to retain information and process it diminishes over time.