Ellen Sadler The Girl Who Went to Bed When She Was 11 and Woke Up When She Was 21
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People say that a good night's sleep can make all of our problems go away. We all sometimes wish that we could just sleep away all the stress in our lives, and we wish we could sleep for hours and hours. But have you ever thought about what it would be like to wake up after being asleep for a long time?
Well, we're not talking about a fairy tale character who can only wake up after being kissed by the prince. There was a real person who slept for years and didn't remember anything about that when she woke up.
In the 1800s, a British girl named Ellen Sadler went to bed when she was 11 years old and didn't wake up until she was 21 years old. When Ellen went to sleep, medicine was just starting to become more modern. Everything was pretty new, and most things were pretty easy.
When the world found out that Ellen was the first person to get trypanosomiasis, or "sleeping sickness," everyone was shocked.
History Of Yesterday says that she was born on May 15, 1859, into a large family of 12 children. She was their tenth child. Her family lived in a small British village called Turville, which was between Oxford and Buckinghamshire. Her father was a farmer who died in an accident when she was young. Her mom remarried a man who worked in a factory.
Ellen and her other siblings all went to sleep at night in 1871, but Ellen didn't wake up the next morning. They yelled at her, shook her, and pushed her, but nothing worked.
When word got out, people came to help Ellen even though they didn't know what was wrong with her. She also became a popular place for tourists to visit and was called the "sleeping girl." People would pay a lot of money for a single strand of her hair.
Medical experts from all over the world started coming to Ellen's house, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong.
People couldn't understand how she had stayed alive for so long. Ellen's mother gave her oatmeal, milk, and wine in a small teapot. It is hard to feed someone who is already asleep. When one of Ellen's jaws got stuck, it was even harder. Then, her mother would feed her through a small space between her teeth. Before Ellen woke up, her mother had a heart attack and died.
Five months after her mother died, Ellen woke up. She was mentally still 11 years old, so it took her a long time to understand the world.
Ellen had a disease called Narcolepsy, which was caused by not having enough Orexin. Orexin is a brain chemical called hypocretin that helps people wake up from sleep.
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She died in 1910, and no one really knew why. She got married, and she and her husband had six children.
