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What is Sleeping Beauty Syndrome?

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A young nurse suffers from an extremely rare condition known as "Sleeping Beauty Syndrome", in which she sleeps for two weeks at a time.

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Bella Andrew, 24, sleeps more than 20 hours a day and becomes a "zombie" during her episodes. She has had numerous episodes that lasted for weeks at a time since she was 17, but she was only diagnosed in September.

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"It's often called sleeping beauty syndrome, which it really isn't. It's anything but sleeping beauty, it's like a nightmare."

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"You know when you have a nightmare where you fall off a cliff and then you wake yourself up? For me that nightmare lasted for 10 days straight."

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"Sleeping beauty syndrome" — medically called Klein-Lewin syndrome (KLS) — causes intermittent episodes of sleeping for long periods of time, often 16-20 hours per day, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The cause of KLS is still unknown.

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"I'm so dazed. I can't work because it's like I'm in a dream. It's just a dream you don't really wake up from."

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The only way she gets through an episode is a sleepless night, she shared, and when she wakes up the next morning, she feels better. However, Andrew struggles with sleep because he won't know wake up in the morning

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Doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her and thought it might be a reaction to her birth control pill.

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After months of scans and tests ruling out tumours, cancer and epilepsy, she finally received an unofficial diagnosis of KLS from a neurologist in Newcastle.

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Andrew said she has lost almost a year of her life to the condition, missed her 19th birthday and recently had an episode when she was due to be a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding.

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