I cannot even begin to imagine. In the video it is VERY apparent that this little boy is exhausted. Cranky doesn’t even describe it. He hits his parents constantly….
Medical Mystery: The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep
Rhett Lamb, 3, Stays Awake Nearly 24 Hours a Day
By ANDREA CANNING and MELLEN O’KEEFE
May 10, 2008
Rhett Lamb, 3, is often irritable, but it’s not just the routine growing pains of a toddler’s life that has affected him. It’s the fact that Rhett can’t sleep. Three-year-old Rhett Lamb is awake nearly 24 hours a day.
“We went to the doctor after he was born, and I kept telling him something was wrong. He didn’t sleep. They thought I was being kind of an anxious mom, and we went back and forth,” Rhett’s mother, Shannon Lamb, said. “Finally, they [were] starting to realize now that he really doesn’t sleep at all. But we’ve had a lot of different diagnoses and nobody really knows.”
His sleep deprivation caused made him very irritable.
“That’s going to have a great impact on his behavior during the day—his irritability, his ability to eat—and I’m sure it also impacted the parents tremendously,” said Marie Savard, an ABC News medical consultant.
Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.
After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.
“The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system,” Savard said.
In order to relieve the pressure on Rhett’s brain stem, doctors performed surgery this week that they hope will allow him to sleep properly for the first time in his life. Surgeons made an incision at the base of Rhett’s skull to the top of his neck and removed the bone around the brain stem and spinal cord, which produced more space.
“Doing the decompression, relieving that pressure, should absolutely improve those symptoms,” Savard said.
Still, doctors said the Lambs may not see major changes for several months or possibly even a year. But Rhett’s parents hope their son will be able to get some rest and be normal.
“There is a 50-50 chance that the sleep will improve,” Shannon Lamb said. “Once the sleep improves, we can work on the behavioral stuff. He’s very irritable all of the time.
There was a documentary quite a few years ago now, about a professor of music, tenured at a college somewhere here in the States. He developed a condition in his brain where too much protein of some type was being generated. He tried to sleep without success and believed that he was just sleeping (at first) more lightly.
Eventually he’d holler at his wife sleeping soundly beside him to ‘PLEASE shut up’. I believe it was after absolutely no sleep for two weeks to a month, he had to use canes to walk, was generally disoriented and almost palsied. He and his wife knew he was going to have to be hospitalized but he conducted one last symphony performance at the school before being admitted. I remember there was film of that last event as well as ongoing filming at the hospital.
The doctors even tried to put him into a coma for awhile while they explored causes over a period of two years and that was as long as he lived after the condition began. The last videos of him were just horrendous. He looked always as if he was just drifing to sleep but that never happened. He could comprehend very simple questions but though he was no longer able to voice an answer, he could with one questions ‘how many fingers am I holding up’ respond with a parroting of the same on his own hand.
I’m going to see if I can perhaps find this gentleman’s story online if possible.
The brain cannot function long without sleep, but will apparently attempt for quite awhile before body functions also simply fail.
Even these virtual motorway accidents are not as disturbing as the story of Michael Corke, a music teacher in Chicago, who died of sleeplessness in 1993. A grainy amateur video shows him at his last school concert, walking unsteadily to the conductor’s podium and raising his baton, as if he were 90 years old. At that point, he had gone two months without sleep.
Soon after, he was admitted to the University of Chicago hospital. Doctors initially diagnosed multiple sclerosis. Pictures from the Wellcome exhibition show him in his hospital bed, barely able to speak, after 130 days without sleep. Doctors administered sedatives in a dose sufficient to induce coma in any normal human being, but Corke was unaffected. He was finally diagnosed with the rare genetic disorder of fatal familial insomnia, for which there is no treatment and no cure. He died, aged 42, after six months without sleep. The condition has so far been identified in just 25 families worldwide.
There are more case studies though on this site though, and a better understanding of what sleep and lack of it does.
I think in the case of the three-year old boy in the article and some others as well, they ARE getting mini sleep sessions of 2 hours and that’s probably why they are still alive longer than those who get none.
Maegan, does she average just 2 hours of sleep each 24-hour period? Or does she sleep periodically during the day? That makes a difference if there is an average total of 6-12 hours of sleep over a 24-hour period even if it’s not straight through but in many different times.
She sleeps for 2 hours at a time…wakes up…and if it’s the middle of the night I give her a pacifier or let her nurse to put her back to sleep (and she does wake up almost exactly 2 hours later anyway)...and during the day she ‘catnaps’...with 20-40 minute naps.
Even these virtual motorway accidents are not as disturbing as the story of Michael Corke, a music teacher in Chicago, who died of sleeplessness in 1993. A grainy amateur video shows him at his last school concert, walking unsteadily to the conductor’s podium and raising his baton, as if he were 90 years old. At that point, he had gone two months without sleep.
Soon after, he was admitted to the University of Chicago hospital. Doctors initially diagnosed multiple sclerosis. Pictures from the Wellcome exhibition show him in his hospital bed, barely able to speak, after 130 days without sleep. Doctors administered sedatives in a dose sufficient to induce coma in any normal human being, but Corke was unaffected. He was finally diagnosed with the rare genetic disorder of fatal familial insomnia, for which there is no treatment and no cure. He died, aged 42, after six months without sleep. The condition has so far been identified in just 25 families worldwide.
There are more case studies though on this site though, and a better understanding of what sleep and lack of it does.
I think in the case of the three-year old boy in the article and some others as well, they ARE getting mini sleep sessions of 2 hours and that’s probably why they are still alive longer than those who get none.
If I’d have gone 130 days without sleep I’d have blown my brains out.
I get more than cranky I ‘see’ things that aren’t there (actually, I do that anyway but I ‘know’ they aren’t real when I lucid), stumble and shake, severe headache. I’ve gone about 72 hours before and I’m not kidding, I hallucinated badly, could not think let alone concentrate on anything and NO WAY could I use any kind of machinery.
The longest I’ve gone without sleep is about 36 hours, and I was seeing things that weren’t there. (A line of shadow wallabies hopping across the side of a marquee.)
