WEBVTT - The Mystery of the Sleepy Sickness 0:00:01.480 --> 0:00:07.720 Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:11.119 --> 0:00:13.520 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's 0:00:13.640 --> 0:00:17.640 Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is a good 0:00:17.680 --> 0:00:21.360 old fashioned stuff you should know. Medical mystery episode. 0:00:21.560 --> 0:00:21.960 That's right. 0:00:22.040 --> 0:00:25.120 Look at Jerry were there. She's just sitting there. She's frozen. 0:00:25.960 --> 0:00:28.200 And what you can do is, I don't know if 0:00:28.240 --> 0:00:30.360 you know this, Josh, if you walk over to Jerry 0:00:30.400 --> 0:00:32.040 and take her hand off the keyboard and raise it 0:00:32.040 --> 0:00:34.760 above her head, she'll just keep it there until you 0:00:34.800 --> 0:00:35.480 move it back down. 0:00:36.240 --> 0:00:40.120 Why, Chuck, sounds a lot to me like Jerry might 0:00:40.240 --> 0:00:43.280 have chronic encephalitic lethargica. 0:00:44.760 --> 0:00:45.680 I think you might be right. 0:00:46.600 --> 0:00:48.440 I might be right. I might be partially right. I 0:00:48.440 --> 0:00:49.919 think I would have been more right if I had 0:00:49.920 --> 0:00:55.320 called it encephalitis lethargica. But that's probably what she has. 0:00:55.360 --> 0:00:57.120 If those are her symptoms. 0:00:57.120 --> 0:00:57.560 That's right. 0:00:58.160 --> 0:01:01.720 File this under medical mysteries and also filing under a 0:01:01.840 --> 0:01:06.320 Julia jam But we're basically going to call it el 0:01:06.440 --> 0:01:09.720 or encephalitis lethargica here and there. I was also known 0:01:09.760 --> 0:01:14.520 as the sleepy sickness, sometimes the sleeping sickness, although there's 0:01:14.560 --> 0:01:17.679 a new sleeping sickness that is not to be confused 0:01:17.720 --> 0:01:18.959 with the previous one. 0:01:19.160 --> 0:01:22.920 No, it's spread by the tetsifly and it's epidemic. I 0:01:22.959 --> 0:01:26.319 don't think it's endemic yet in Africa, and it has 0:01:26.720 --> 0:01:29.160 got a couple of similar symptoms, but they're in no 0:01:29.240 --> 0:01:30.920 way related from what I understand. 0:01:31.319 --> 0:01:31.760 That's right. 0:01:31.760 --> 0:01:34.280 We're talking about an outbreak that happened in the early 0:01:34.520 --> 0:01:40.120 twentieth century in Europe, starting in about nineteen sixteen, wherein 0:01:40.480 --> 0:01:43.040 all of a sudden, people would kind of out of nowhere, 0:01:43.400 --> 0:01:46.880 they would lose mobility, some people would fall into a 0:01:46.959 --> 0:01:50.120 coma like state or a sleep like state. Many many 0:01:50.160 --> 0:01:54.360 people would die within days, and it reached epidemic proportions 0:01:54.400 --> 0:01:58.520 in at least four continents by nineteen nineteen, killed hundreds 0:01:58.520 --> 0:01:59.440 of thousands of people. 0:01:59.840 --> 0:02:03.160 And it's a medical mystery because we still don't. 0:02:02.880 --> 0:02:06.840 Know exactly why it happened or why it just kind 0:02:06.840 --> 0:02:07.760 of suddenly went away. 0:02:08.000 --> 0:02:10.600 Yeah, where it came from, what caused it? Nothing, We 0:02:10.680 --> 0:02:13.520 don't know almost anything about it. They just kind of 0:02:13.639 --> 0:02:17.919 know the symptoms enough that when you see the very 0:02:18.240 --> 0:02:21.679 very very rare case come along these days, you can say, 0:02:21.680 --> 0:02:25.679 I think this actually is encephalitis lethargica. And there was 0:02:25.720 --> 0:02:28.200 something you said about people being struck into like a 0:02:28.240 --> 0:02:32.280 coma or sleeplike state. The people who are struck with 0:02:32.360 --> 0:02:34.880 in cephalites lethargica, they weren't like laying there like sleeping 0:02:34.880 --> 0:02:37.640 beauty on their backs with like their hands crossed over 0:02:37.680 --> 0:02:40.560 their chest like it was like you're saying, like they 0:02:40.639 --> 0:02:42.320 might have their hand in the air and their mouth 0:02:42.320 --> 0:02:44.640 open and like a silent scream and their eyes were open. 0:02:44.720 --> 0:02:47.960 They just weren't moving at all and they were just 0:02:48.040 --> 0:02:51.639 sitting like that. That's the kind of like horrible symptom 0:02:51.880 --> 0:02:55.600 that you could suffer from for decades. Like once that started, 0:02:56.040 --> 0:02:58.120 it might just keep going on for the rest of 0:02:58.160 --> 0:03:00.560 your life, even though this happened to you and childhood. 0:03:01.080 --> 0:03:03.919 Yeah, exactly so. And there's a bit of a reveal 0:03:03.960 --> 0:03:05.960 that we're going to hang on to here. But we're 0:03:06.000 --> 0:03:08.679 gonna start off with not a reveal because that's not 0:03:08.760 --> 0:03:10.480 how you do things in the. 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:13.000 Three act structure, not in the podcast. 0:03:13.040 --> 0:03:14.520 Biz no, no, No. 0:03:14.880 --> 0:03:19.400 We're gonna start out nineteen sixteen with a doctor constantin Vaughan. 0:03:20.240 --> 0:03:25.280 Is it economo or Economo? I? Like the first one 0:03:25.720 --> 0:03:29.280 that's like saying is it economy or economy? 0:03:30.440 --> 0:03:35.960 This sounds to me like a Cosmo Kramer alias why. 0:03:35.880 --> 0:03:37.400 Don't you just tell me the name of the movie 0:03:37.440 --> 0:03:39.840 you want to see. 0:03:40.360 --> 0:03:41.560 I'll never not laugh at that bit. 0:03:41.640 --> 0:03:42.560 No, it's a good one. 0:03:43.320 --> 0:03:43.800 Oh boy. 0:03:44.280 --> 0:03:47.640 So he was a doctor at the University of Vienna's 0:03:47.840 --> 0:03:53.600 psychiatric neurological clinic and he started seeing some strange cases 0:03:53.680 --> 0:03:56.960 come through his office in nineteen sixteen where the symptoms 0:03:56.960 --> 0:04:00.360 were you know, they had diagnoses on the charts, like 0:04:00.880 --> 0:04:04.000 meningitis or MS or delirium, but the symptoms weren't matching 0:04:04.040 --> 0:04:06.840 these things or anything else that he could think of. Yeah, 0:04:06.880 --> 0:04:10.240 and the first thing he did was ruled out neurological toxins, 0:04:11.160 --> 0:04:15.800 infections and neurological disorders, and then was like, all right, 0:04:15.920 --> 0:04:18.760 I'm open here. Let let's like, no one knows what 0:04:18.800 --> 0:04:20.560 this is and we need to figure it out, so 0:04:20.640 --> 0:04:22.400 let's sort of put our minds to this thing. 0:04:22.640 --> 0:04:25.800 Yeah, he dove in. He started describing it. He wasn't 0:04:25.800 --> 0:04:28.240 actually the first one to describe it. I think he 0:04:28.360 --> 0:04:31.320 was actually beaten by a couple of days, even though 0:04:31.320 --> 0:04:33.360 some people say it was the opposite way around, by 0:04:33.400 --> 0:04:37.640 a French physician named doctor Renee Cruschet. The difference was 0:04:37.760 --> 0:04:42.200 doctor Crusette's take was that this was maybe a behavioral disorder, 0:04:42.920 --> 0:04:47.039 and doctor Economo von Economo said, no, this is like 0:04:47.160 --> 0:04:49.480 clearly some sort of infection or something like that. It's 0:04:49.480 --> 0:04:53.320 an epidemic. It's transmissible. So that's why this is sometimes 0:04:53.400 --> 0:04:58.520 called Economo encephalitis. It was essentially named after him because 0:04:58.520 --> 0:05:00.000 he was the guy who said, this is what's going 0:05:00.080 --> 0:05:02.040 going on. This is what I think is going on. 0:05:02.320 --> 0:05:04.719 Check out these nutso symptoms. 0:05:04.600 --> 0:05:07.440 Right, not so nuts to at first, because when people 0:05:07.440 --> 0:05:10.000 would come in at first, they had basically looked like 0:05:10.000 --> 0:05:15.120 the flu, you know, fever, coughing, you know, kind of 0:05:15.160 --> 0:05:17.520 what you would think of. Everyone said the flu, right, yeah, 0:05:17.560 --> 0:05:20.120 I don't, I don't. Yeah, there you go. 0:05:20.160 --> 0:05:21.960 That's I watched Zuelander recently. 0:05:22.279 --> 0:05:24.000 You know, a picture is worth a thousand words. A 0:05:24.080 --> 0:05:27.160 Josh impression of the flu was worth at least twenty 0:05:27.200 --> 0:05:28.200 of my words. 0:05:28.920 --> 0:05:29.840 All right, thanks? 0:05:30.320 --> 0:05:32.760 Was that part of Zulander, did you? 0:05:32.839 --> 0:05:36.120 Yeah? He had the black clung when he went back 0:05:36.160 --> 0:05:38.560 home to mine coal with his dad. 0:05:38.880 --> 0:05:40.320 Oh, I love that dumb movie. 0:05:40.480 --> 0:05:42.919 It is a really great dumb movie. I was like, 0:05:43.000 --> 0:05:47.760 this is pretty great still. 0:05:45.880 --> 0:05:48.760 All right, So flu like symptoms at first, then just 0:05:49.279 --> 0:05:52.400 a huge array of neurological symptoms that were really inconsistent 0:05:52.440 --> 0:05:57.000 among the patients, the severity of which was pretty inconsistent. 0:05:57.120 --> 0:06:00.200 Sometimes it varied widely from one to another. But one 0:06:00.200 --> 0:06:02.760 of the most common threads of these neurological symptoms was 0:06:03.680 --> 0:06:08.279 something called hyper somnolence, which is just really really sleepy, 0:06:09.360 --> 0:06:11.839 like feeling really sleepy, and then eventually it could lead 0:06:11.839 --> 0:06:14.360 to that coma like state where you're just sort of 0:06:14.640 --> 0:06:15.120 locked in. 0:06:15.720 --> 0:06:19.599 So here's the thing. I so the sleep, the type 0:06:19.600 --> 0:06:24.040 of sleep though that is common among people struck within 0:06:24.080 --> 0:06:28.200 cephalitis lethargica, is not what you would consider sleep. They're 0:06:28.240 --> 0:06:32.400 not getting rest. You can wake them very easily. They 0:06:32.720 --> 0:06:35.800 are probably semi aware of what was going on around 0:06:35.800 --> 0:06:39.840 them the whole time they were sleeping, but they couldn't 0:06:39.880 --> 0:06:43.520 not fall asleep. Another thing that sometimes gets chalked up 0:06:43.600 --> 0:06:48.360 under this hypersominolence is freezing mid action, like maybe they're 0:06:48.360 --> 0:06:52.440 taking a bite of broccoli. That's a bad example because 0:06:52.440 --> 0:06:54.760 they probably are like, I can't make myself eat this brocoli. 0:06:54.760 --> 0:06:57.080 It's so disgusting. But let's say they're eating like a 0:06:57.120 --> 0:07:00.880 delicious animal cracker, and they stopped mid bite. They might 0:07:00.920 --> 0:07:05.480 not move again, or they might like hear a song 0:07:05.600 --> 0:07:06.839 or something like that, and all of a sudden they 0:07:06.880 --> 0:07:10.320 start eating the animal cracker again. 0:07:10.720 --> 0:07:11.320 Yeah, it's not. 0:07:11.840 --> 0:07:14.520 The point is it's called the sleeping sickness. It's not 0:07:14.760 --> 0:07:16.600 sleep as you would understand it. 0:07:16.880 --> 0:07:18.520 Yeah. Yeah, that's good to clear that up. 0:07:18.640 --> 0:07:21.800 Thanks, because sleeping sickness sounds pretty good to me right 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:22.200 about now. 0:07:23.120 --> 0:07:23.960 It kind of does. 0:07:25.160 --> 0:07:27.880 Half of these cases, it was a pretty wide age range. 0:07:27.880 --> 0:07:30.520 About half of them were in people aged ten to thirty. 0:07:31.760 --> 0:07:33.960 Like I said, a lot of the patients died. Sometimes 0:07:34.000 --> 0:07:36.680 they died within like a week or two after onset 0:07:36.680 --> 0:07:39.560 of symptoms. There was one case of a girl who 0:07:39.840 --> 0:07:44.600 was walking home from a concert suddenly experienced a paralysis, 0:07:44.720 --> 0:07:47.640 fell asleep within about a half hour, and died less 0:07:47.640 --> 0:07:48.400 than two weeks later. 0:07:49.520 --> 0:07:52.440 There was also some weird stuff, as we'll see, that 0:07:52.640 --> 0:07:56.040 had to do a psychiatric system symptoms, where sometimes people 0:07:56.120 --> 0:07:59.280 would be fine after you know, suffering from this for 0:07:59.320 --> 0:08:02.320 a couple of weeks, but they will their personality would 0:08:02.360 --> 0:08:06.320 have changed. There was one report of I guess a 0:08:06.360 --> 0:08:11.080 study found four reports of people who developed kleptomania after 0:08:11.120 --> 0:08:15.200 having suffered this and then ostensibly were cured from it. 0:08:15.600 --> 0:08:18.360 So like, it could really mess with your head, essentially 0:08:18.400 --> 0:08:20.600 in just about any way your head can be messed with. 0:08:21.360 --> 0:08:25.160 Uh did win Ona Writer claim that was her? Remember 0:08:25.200 --> 0:08:26.240 when she was stealing stuff? 0:08:26.520 --> 0:08:27.440 Oh? Yeah, I remember. 0:08:27.920 --> 0:08:29.160 It was so weird. 0:08:29.240 --> 0:08:29.960 It was a big deal. 0:08:30.320 --> 0:08:33.480 She came back pretty strong, which I'm glad. I like 0:08:33.480 --> 0:08:36.040 Winona Writer. She does a great job in Stranger Things. 0:08:36.160 --> 0:08:39.560 Oh, she's awesome and everything she's ever been in. Heather's Dude, 0:08:39.679 --> 0:08:41.559 just one of the all time great movies. She was 0:08:41.600 --> 0:08:44.880 great Mermaids, and then yeah, all the way through to Beetlejuice. 0:08:45.320 --> 0:08:48.640 I'm not gonna say Beetlejuice Beetle Juice, but definitely Beetlejuice. 0:08:48.760 --> 0:08:49.920 And then Stranger thinks. 0:08:49.800 --> 0:08:54.120 Sure, yeah, and a great crush of much of gen 0:08:54.360 --> 0:08:58.120 X for sure. Both dudes and chicks. 0:08:58.400 --> 0:09:01.559 You got that straight. We're talking and dudes and chicks. 0:09:02.200 --> 0:09:03.120 Jen X says that. 0:09:03.480 --> 0:09:05.440 Yeah, they do, all right. 0:09:05.480 --> 0:09:09.040 So Van Economo was studying all these people. He was 0:09:09.080 --> 0:09:13.720 studying corpses of these people. He finally breaks it down 0:09:13.800 --> 0:09:18.120 into its subgroups, the first of which is acute e 0:09:18.400 --> 0:09:21.120 l That is the initial signals that you're going to get. 0:09:21.200 --> 0:09:23.320 We talked about the fluey kind of stuff that you 0:09:23.360 --> 0:09:27.240 get and all these neurological symptoms that are going to follow. 0:09:27.640 --> 0:09:30.640 Then he broke those down into three forms, from most 0:09:30.679 --> 0:09:37.960 common to least common, starting with the most common somnolent ophthalmologic. 0:09:39.520 --> 0:09:44.440 How would you say that, ophthalmologic ophthalmoplegic, That's what I'm going. 0:09:44.280 --> 0:09:46.640 With, all right, that's the most deadly form. 0:09:47.000 --> 0:09:50.079 More than half the patients die when they have this form. 0:09:50.200 --> 0:09:54.000 This is a really overwhelming sleepiness, but like you said, 0:09:54.000 --> 0:09:57.840 you're aware, you're easy to wake up. The optimal part 0:09:58.040 --> 0:10:01.160 is ocular paralysis, so you have you're not moving your eyes, 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:03.800 so if people come and they wave their hand in 0:10:03.840 --> 0:10:05.560 front of your face, your eyes aren't moving or anything 0:10:05.600 --> 0:10:09.319 like that. And also those neuro psychiatric symptoms that you 0:10:09.360 --> 0:10:14.920 were talking about, like delirium sometimes confusion, catatonius, stupor stuff 0:10:14.920 --> 0:10:15.240 like that. 0:10:15.440 --> 0:10:18.640 There was also the worst report that I saw, and like, 0:10:18.720 --> 0:10:20.760 I didn't see anything like this, but I checked and 0:10:20.800 --> 0:10:22.800 it does seem to have been a case report of 0:10:22.840 --> 0:10:27.200 a girl from the thirties who basically had a psychotic 0:10:27.240 --> 0:10:29.600 break because of it, and she pulled out all of 0:10:29.600 --> 0:10:31.520 her own teeth and ouch out both of her eyes. 0:10:31.760 --> 0:10:35.439 A little girl did because of this. And again it's 0:10:35.480 --> 0:10:38.880 just some weird outlier symptom. But as you see, when 0:10:38.880 --> 0:10:41.640 we get further and further into this, it's just the 0:10:41.720 --> 0:10:47.080 brain getting eaten up somehow someway in some fairly predictable regions. 0:10:47.080 --> 0:10:51.000 So it's creating this whole cascade or galaxy of different 0:10:51.440 --> 0:10:54.319 symptoms that are just the worst things that can happen 0:10:54.320 --> 0:10:55.560 to your brain happening. 0:10:56.240 --> 0:11:00.559 Yeah, the next subgroup of the next least or I 0:11:00.600 --> 0:11:03.360 guess the next most common depending on which way you're 0:11:03.360 --> 0:11:07.280 looking at it, is hyperkinetic. That is mania basically is 0:11:07.280 --> 0:11:08.839 the big part of this one. You have a manic 0:11:08.880 --> 0:11:14.080 phase in voluntary vocalizations and kind of herky jerky movements, 0:11:14.440 --> 0:11:16.920 and then a hypomanic phase where there's a lot of fatigue, 0:11:16.920 --> 0:11:20.200 a lot of weakness, you can hallucinate, you can have 0:11:20.320 --> 0:11:23.040 nerve pain in your limbs and in your face. And 0:11:23.840 --> 0:11:27.120 this is one of the odder symptoms is your sleep 0:11:27.440 --> 0:11:30.880 pattern will flip from day to night or I guess 0:11:31.480 --> 0:11:31.920 night to day. 0:11:31.960 --> 0:11:34.280 If you were a factory worker or something. 0:11:34.679 --> 0:11:37.680 And there's another thing with that sleeping sickness part, you know, 0:11:37.800 --> 0:11:40.800 like your sleep is messed up. I also saw a 0:11:40.880 --> 0:11:44.360 chuck that in at least one of these people might 0:11:44.400 --> 0:11:47.200 also be super sleepy but not be able to fall 0:11:47.240 --> 0:11:50.560 asleep no matter how hard they try, which sounds worse 0:11:50.600 --> 0:11:52.320 to me than most of the other stuff. 0:11:52.960 --> 0:11:53.360 For sure. 0:11:53.600 --> 0:11:56.600 There's a third one that he said is the least common, 0:11:56.640 --> 0:11:59.240 but it's also a way that it can present. It's 0:11:59.280 --> 0:12:05.520 called hemiostatic akinetic, which is you can't move akinesis. And 0:12:05.600 --> 0:12:08.440 this is kind of what the classic idea of what 0:12:08.840 --> 0:12:13.400 encephalitis lethargica looks like, where you're just you're just sitting 0:12:13.440 --> 0:12:16.320 there with like, yeah, your right arms in the air, 0:12:16.559 --> 0:12:20.559 your left arms a little further down, your mouth's open. 0:12:21.040 --> 0:12:26.240 You're basically a statue essentially, is how it's described. You're 0:12:26.400 --> 0:12:30.000 frozen in place and you're not going to move until 0:12:30.120 --> 0:12:33.640 somebody maybe put some slight pressure on your arm and 0:12:33.679 --> 0:12:35.800 then maybe you'll move it down. But it's not that 0:12:36.040 --> 0:12:37.680 they're just going to put pressure on your arm for 0:12:37.679 --> 0:12:39.760 a second and then you move your arm down, like 0:12:39.800 --> 0:12:42.360 they have to move your arm down. And this is 0:12:42.400 --> 0:12:46.640 what's called waxy flexibility. You can pose somebody in this 0:12:46.800 --> 0:12:50.960 state any way that you want them to, So you 0:12:51.040 --> 0:12:54.360 have to be very kind when you're dealing with patients 0:12:54.440 --> 0:12:54.679 like this. 0:12:55.480 --> 0:12:58.400 Yeah, I could not help but think that waxyf of 0:12:58.440 --> 0:13:02.880 flexibility sounds like an album title for sure, like Guided 0:13:02.960 --> 0:13:04.280 by Voices or somebody. 0:13:05.600 --> 0:13:06.240 Lips inc. 0:13:07.920 --> 0:13:08.640 Is that a real band? 0:13:09.000 --> 0:13:10.760 Yeah, they're a function town people. 0:13:11.200 --> 0:13:16.679 Oh oh okay, yeah, oh waxy flexibility. Sure nailed it. God, 0:13:16.840 --> 0:13:18.040 why voice is? What was I thinking? 0:13:18.200 --> 0:13:22.760 This is the the biggest part to me, I guess 0:13:22.840 --> 0:13:25.719 part of all of this because of the sleeping part. 0:13:25.920 --> 0:13:28.840 The people suffering this, including the people who are or 0:13:28.880 --> 0:13:33.120 wax figures frozen in place for years or decades potentially, 0:13:34.400 --> 0:13:39.120 are there mentally. They're not like locked in as in 0:13:39.200 --> 0:13:41.720 locked in syndrome, where they know every single thing that's 0:13:41.720 --> 0:13:45.040 going on around them at all times, right, But they're 0:13:45.160 --> 0:13:49.280 essentially in the same boat where they're aware of stuff. 0:13:49.280 --> 0:13:52.400 They're aware of time passing. There were people coming and 0:13:52.440 --> 0:13:58.080 going and interacting with them. They cannot respond, they can't speak, 0:13:58.120 --> 0:14:00.800 they can't change their position of their eye, they can't 0:14:00.960 --> 0:14:04.440 focus their attention, they can't do anything that would suggest 0:14:04.520 --> 0:14:08.199 to anyone that they are there in any way to 0:14:08.400 --> 0:14:12.280 er form. And it wasn't until a genuine medical miracle 0:14:12.320 --> 0:14:15.680 took place that we understood, Oh my god, these people 0:14:15.760 --> 0:14:18.200 have been there in their heads the whole time. They're 0:14:18.240 --> 0:14:22.480 not just like comatose, like just completely out of consciousness. 0:14:22.680 --> 0:14:24.040 They're conscious. 0:14:24.320 --> 0:14:28.760 Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you know, earlier I said 0:14:28.800 --> 0:14:30.960 like they're locked in. I didn't mean the literal locked 0:14:31.000 --> 0:14:33.000 in syndrome. I just meant sort of, you know, look 0:14:33.080 --> 0:14:33.720 like they're locked in. 0:14:34.600 --> 0:14:36.800 Yeah. I didn't take it like that, Yeah, but I 0:14:36.840 --> 0:14:40.920 think people might have. So, yeah, well, come on, guys. 0:14:41.520 --> 0:14:43.880 We don't know how many cases there were. It was 0:14:43.920 --> 0:14:47.320 a legitimate pandemic, though it's one of the things that 0:14:47.400 --> 0:14:48.359 was hard to diagnose. 0:14:48.920 --> 0:14:50.680 They think it was under diagnosed and. 0:14:50.600 --> 0:14:53.680 Reported estimates run from five hundred thousand to more than 0:14:53.720 --> 0:14:56.320 a million, but they think that maybe half of the 0:14:56.360 --> 0:14:58.440 cases weren't even reported to who knows how many it 0:14:58.480 --> 0:15:01.640 could have been. About a third of them died, a 0:15:01.720 --> 0:15:05.080 third survived and we're kind of okay, And then a 0:15:05.120 --> 0:15:10.360 third survived and then got it again later on, and 0:15:10.440 --> 0:15:13.000 that is acute eel. So maybe we should take a 0:15:13.000 --> 0:15:14.920 break and talk about chronic el after. 0:15:14.720 --> 0:15:44.280 This let's all right, We'll be right back, okay, Chuck. 0:15:44.360 --> 0:15:45.960 So a lot of the stuff I was talking about 0:15:45.960 --> 0:15:49.640 about people being frozen in place as if they were statues, 0:15:49.680 --> 0:15:54.120 they had waxy flexibility, mutism, catatonia, They weren't able to 0:15:54.160 --> 0:15:58.320 respond or move or anything. When I said for like 0:15:58.400 --> 0:16:02.520 years or decades, more accurately, I would have been referring 0:16:02.560 --> 0:16:06.920 to the chronic form of encephalitis lethargica, because it was 0:16:07.040 --> 0:16:10.160 essentially it seems to me kind of like ammeostatic akinetic, 0:16:10.720 --> 0:16:14.320 but for years and years. The scariest part about all 0:16:14.360 --> 0:16:19.080 this was that you had gone through the standard case 0:16:19.520 --> 0:16:23.840 of encephalitis lethargica, one of those three that we just 0:16:23.920 --> 0:16:28.560 talked about, and got better. You may have died, You 0:16:28.640 --> 0:16:33.160 may have gotten better, but maybe you had like behavior changes, 0:16:33.200 --> 0:16:35.480 like you turned into a kleptomaniac or something like that. 0:16:36.160 --> 0:16:39.600 Or you got better and thought everything was fine, but 0:16:39.720 --> 0:16:44.400 then you suddenly suffered from being just a ton of 0:16:44.440 --> 0:16:46.160 bricks being dropped on you, and all of a sudden 0:16:46.160 --> 0:16:48.040 you can't move for the rest of your life, even 0:16:48.080 --> 0:16:50.200 though it's been ten years since you had that case 0:16:50.440 --> 0:16:52.080 of encephalitis lethargica. 0:16:52.680 --> 0:16:56.480 Yeah, for sure. The chronic is much the same as 0:16:56.520 --> 0:16:59.200 the earlier but with a few added symptoms, one of 0:16:59.240 --> 0:17:02.880 which is very, very strange. You can have mood swings, 0:17:03.320 --> 0:17:08.080 pretty normal feelings of euphoria, and maybe even an increased libido, 0:17:08.240 --> 0:17:12.480 which is not the weirdest thing psychosis in about thirty 0:17:12.480 --> 0:17:15.800 percent of patients, again not the most abnormal thing in 0:17:15.800 --> 0:17:19.320 the world, but excessive silliness in the use of puns 0:17:19.800 --> 0:17:22.640 was an actual symptom that they saw over and over 0:17:22.720 --> 0:17:26.040 again in acute cases. Yeah, isn't that bizarre or not 0:17:26.080 --> 0:17:28.000 acute in chronic cases, right? 0:17:28.080 --> 0:17:31.840 Yeah? Yeah, But again, the defining trait, the one that 0:17:31.840 --> 0:17:33.639 people would point to and be like, oh, that person 0:17:33.720 --> 0:17:37.600 has chronic encephalitis lethargica is that statue thing that I 0:17:37.600 --> 0:17:41.520 was talking about, And that's more clinically called rather than 0:17:41.560 --> 0:17:46.199 that statue thing, doctors tend to call it post encephalotic parkinsonism, 0:17:46.880 --> 0:17:50.760 and parkinsonism is one of those difficult things to grasp 0:17:50.840 --> 0:17:54.520 until you just stop trying to think too hard about it. 0:17:54.520 --> 0:17:58.960 It's essentially a bunch of movement in neurological symptoms and dysfunctions, 0:17:59.720 --> 0:18:06.520 and Parkinson's includes parkinsonism, but not all parkinsonism is Parkinson's disease. 0:18:07.359 --> 0:18:11.439 That's right, Okay, it took me way longer than I 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:13.760 care to admit to finally just nail that down and 0:18:13.760 --> 0:18:16.440 stop running in circles trying to figure it out. 0:18:16.840 --> 0:18:19.600 Yeah, I mean, I think they even had. One of 0:18:19.600 --> 0:18:26.400 the reasons they call it post encephalitic PARKINSONI is parkinsonism parkinsonism, Gez, 0:18:26.480 --> 0:18:28.439 that's a tough one, I know, or PEP is to 0:18:28.520 --> 0:18:31.680 distinguish it from Parkinson's isn't exactly the same thing. 0:18:31.840 --> 0:18:33.760 Yeah, And one of the big things that distinguish it, 0:18:33.800 --> 0:18:36.119 because a lot of that shares a lot of symptoms. 0:18:36.200 --> 0:18:39.720 But one of the things that distinguishes post encephalatic parkinsonism 0:18:40.040 --> 0:18:45.119 and Parkinson's disease is that Parkinson's disease progresses gradually in 0:18:45.160 --> 0:18:49.439 a predictable pattern. Post Encephalatic parkinsonism, like I said, it 0:18:49.480 --> 0:18:51.879 can come out of the blue. You could be again 0:18:51.960 --> 0:18:54.439 sitting there eating an animal cracker, and all of a sudden, 0:18:54.600 --> 0:18:56.920 you never finished eating that animal cracker for the rest 0:18:56.920 --> 0:18:59.720 of your life. It just can suddenly come out of 0:18:59.720 --> 0:19:03.359 no where and you're just living your normal life, and 0:19:03.359 --> 0:19:05.480 then all of a sudden, you're in an institution and 0:19:05.760 --> 0:19:08.600 you're bound never to move again unless you happen to 0:19:08.600 --> 0:19:10.800 be in the right place at the right time in 0:19:10.840 --> 0:19:12.280 the late nineteen sixties. 0:19:12.800 --> 0:19:15.080 That's right, And this is the big reveal. If you 0:19:15.119 --> 0:19:17.080 were hearing these symptoms and you think, hey, that sounds 0:19:17.080 --> 0:19:19.280 awfully familiar. I think I saw a movie about that, 0:19:19.720 --> 0:19:23.160 then you're correct. This is the movie from the book Awakenings, 0:19:23.760 --> 0:19:27.520 based on neurologist Oliver Sacks' book of the same name 0:19:29.160 --> 0:19:31.800 about his work with EEL patients in the nineteen sixties. 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:34.000 I think there were eighty chronic el patients he worked 0:19:34.000 --> 0:19:37.240 with at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, New York 0:19:37.240 --> 0:19:39.359 in nineteen sixty six. 0:19:40.320 --> 0:19:42.760 When this came around and Oliver Sacks was in there, 0:19:44.440 --> 0:19:45.760 e L had gone away. 0:19:45.800 --> 0:19:48.120 Basically, it was a medical footnote, and not a lot 0:19:48.160 --> 0:19:51.200 of people in the nineteen sixties even knew much about 0:19:51.240 --> 0:19:53.280 it because it was one of those things that they 0:19:53.320 --> 0:19:55.200 never figured out what it was, or how it started, 0:19:55.280 --> 0:19:56.480 or how to cure it or anything. 0:19:56.720 --> 0:19:57.760 It kind of just went away. 0:19:57.800 --> 0:20:00.280 So all the doctors were like, all right, God, I 0:20:00.280 --> 0:20:02.720 guess we don't worry about that anymore, right exactly, And 0:20:02.960 --> 0:20:03.800 they just moved. 0:20:03.600 --> 0:20:04.480 On to their other work. 0:20:05.080 --> 0:20:08.440 There was a nineteen eighty five NPR interview where he 0:20:08.560 --> 0:20:12.639 was talking about this is a quote motionless figures who 0:20:12.680 --> 0:20:17.399 were transfixed in strange postures, sometimes rather dramatic postures, sometimes not, 0:20:17.880 --> 0:20:20.800 with an absolute absence of motion, without any hint of motion, 0:20:21.200 --> 0:20:24.679 So everything looked frozen. And that was you know, Robert 0:20:24.680 --> 0:20:26.600 de Niro's character in the movie Awakenings. 0:20:26.720 --> 0:20:30.959 Yeah, and all the others that he eventually grabbed together. Yeah, 0:20:30.960 --> 0:20:33.280 in assemble. When's the last time he saw Awakenings. 0:20:34.240 --> 0:20:36.439 It's been a while. I think I remember thinking it 0:20:36.440 --> 0:20:37.680 was a pretty good movie back then. Though. 0:20:37.720 --> 0:20:40.680 It's a great movie. Yeah, I watched it last night. 0:20:41.240 --> 0:20:42.399 Who directed that? Do you know? 0:20:42.920 --> 0:20:44.720 Laverne? Oh? 0:20:44.840 --> 0:20:45.639 Was that Penny Marshall? 0:20:45.760 --> 0:20:48.320 Yeah? She did. It was great. I mean, like, I 0:20:48.359 --> 0:20:50.359 don't remember if Tonio got an oscar or not, but 0:20:50.400 --> 0:20:54.320 if you didn't, that's one of the all time great snubs. Yeah, 0:20:54.320 --> 0:20:58.159 she did amazing. I forgot how wonderful Robin Williams is 0:20:58.200 --> 0:21:00.959 to just man, what a great guy that dude was. 0:21:01.880 --> 0:21:03.560 Great dude, great movie too. 0:21:03.600 --> 0:21:05.680 Watching a thing with him this morning and very very 0:21:05.680 --> 0:21:06.280 sad stuff. 0:21:06.359 --> 0:21:07.199 Where were you watching? 0:21:08.720 --> 0:21:10.920 It? Was an Instagram post of him with his mother 0:21:11.240 --> 0:21:14.520 and his mother making him laugh, and I think the 0:21:14.560 --> 0:21:16.560 whole point of the post was like, you rarely got 0:21:16.600 --> 0:21:20.440 to hear Robin Williams like genuine laugh. And I heard 0:21:20.480 --> 0:21:21.840 it and I was like, yeah, I don't know if 0:21:21.880 --> 0:21:23.479