Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

Sounds fun, doesn’t it?  To have a brain disease that makes you break out into laughter every so often?  Not so much when it comes in the form of a “transmissible spongiform encephalopathy” (that’s a neurological disorder of a sort) that is totally incurable, and will eventually kill you.

The term Kuru comes from the Fore word “to shake”.  Fore is the tribe in Papua New Guinea that sort of, like, invented the disease.  They didn’t so much invent as be the first discovered people to have it – by Australian guys in the fifties.  The cause of the disorder is prions – which are proteins or particles which invade the brain.  Other neurological conditions caused by prions are Creutzgeldt-Jakob Disease, Fatal Familial Insomnia, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker Syndrome, and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (also known as Mad Cow Disease).

In addition to the random laughing, the other symptoms of Kuru are headaches, joint pains, and trembling.  The way you get it…well.  You have to ingest the prion that causes the disease.  So, the Fore tribe had these funerary practices that included eating the flesh and organs of the dead members of the tribe in order to absorb their life force.  The Fore started this practice in the 19th century, which seems weird.  I mean, why then?  Anywhoo, this eating of the dead introduced these prions into the system of the people who ate the dead people, and then when they died people cleaned up after them and THOSE people got the prions, and so on.

Lucky for the people of Papua New Guinea, some of them developed an immunity to the prion.  Also, people from University College London are working to learn more.

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We love horror movies.  Well, you might not, but I do.  For funsies, I decided to look into each of my favorite movie monsters and characters and find out what is actually medically wrong with them.  Keep in mind, this is pure speculation, and almost solely for my own benefit.  What?  Um.  No.  I mean, it’s totally for your benefit, because you’re the reader, and what you think matters.  So…you think this is fun, too.  Those other blog posts aren’t the blog posts you’re looking for…

Norman Bates

Ah, good old Norman.  He was a shy, mild-mannered boy who loved his mother more than anything.  Then his mother found a honey, and Norman decided that wasn’t OK.  He had some sort of psychotic break and killed his mother and her boyfriend, and then he was so overcome with guilt and craziness that his personality cleaved.  One part of Norman was left, but the rest of his widdle brain was overtaken by his dead mother.  Not in a possession kind of way, but more in a split-personality, totally nutso way.

The Diagnosis

Norman Bates suffered from split personality disorder, brought on by his too-close connection to his mother, and then  his guilt involving the brutal murder of said mother.  Who knows?  He might have had a little post-traumatic stress disorder as well.

Freddy Krueger

Freddy Krueger, he who terrorizes dreams, is actually the son of a nun who was shut into an asylum with a bunch of murderers and rapists, and they, ahem, took improper liberties with her, and Freddy was conceived.  So, he was the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs.”  He had an abusive stepfather, was endlessly tormented at school, and had a penchant for killing animals.  A budding psycho, his psychosis took full bloom when he went on a big killing spree, killing his wife and a bunch of kids in the neighborhood.  Later, the parents in the neighborhood burned him up, and his essence gained the ability to enter the dreams of poorly-dressed teenagers and kill them.

The Diagnosis

Well, we can’t really speak for the post-getting-burned-to-a-crisp Freddy, but the live and actively killing in the conscious world Freddy suffered from Psychopathy – a disorder that manifests in amoral conduct while the person seems normal on the outside.  Little Freddy killed the class pet and whipped himself with straps, but outwardly he was normal enough to get married, have a kid, and get a house in the suburbs.  After he died, all the psychosis and murderous rage came out.  Good times.

Michael Myers

If we go by the original film’s story, Michael was a little boy from a totally normal family who murdered his big sister on Halloween night.  He spent the next 15 years in a mental institution, not speaking a word, until he escaped to murder his (unknown to the audience) little sister, who had been adopted by another family.  If we believe Rob Zombie’s remake version of the film, little Mikey’s momma was a stripper, she had a totally skeezy and abusive boyfriend, and his sister was sort of  a skank.  The only person he loved was his little sister.  If that’s the case in the original film, we don’t see any indication of that, seeing he tries his best to kill her and all her friends.  In Zombie’s version, he actually drops the knife in the presence of his baby sister.  Bah.  We trust the original because…

The Diagnosis

Dude is the personification of evil.  Not according to Rob Zombie, but definitely according to John Carpenter, and we trust him more, because he conceived the character to begin with.  I realize there is some faulty logic involved with taking an explanation from a movie that Carpenter himself didn’t bless, but Halloween VI:  The Curse of Michael Myers, tells us that Micheal is a cog in the wheel of a Druid cult.  Apparently he’s the personification of evil, so he has to procreate with his own niece in order to create the perfect child to sacrifice when the constellation of Thorn appears in the sky.  Er.  Whatever.  Dude’s evil.

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Somnambulism, also known as sleepwalking, is thought to affect between 1% and 15% of the American population.  The causes are cited to be anything from restless leg syndrome to mental illness, and the manifestations are even wider spread.  There are some cases where people have been said to cook, eat, engage in sexual activity, and even murder…all in their sleep.

When we sleep, that sleep undergoes several stages.  You have your NREM sleep, which is divided into stage 1, stage 2, and stage 3 and 4.  Stage 1 is that light sleep, while stage 2 is a consolidated sleep period, stages 3 and 4 are deep sleep stages (known as “slow-wave sleep”), and after these stages we reach REM state.  REM sleep (REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement) is where your eyes move rapidly under your eyelids, your respiration and heart rate can be irregular, and this is when you’re most likely to dream.  Despite the rapid movement of the eyes, the respiration and heart rate irregularities, and the fact that your brain is possibly occupied by a dream, this is supposed to be our most restful stage of sleep, and it accounts for 90-120 minutes of a total night’s sleep.  “Normal” sleepwalking occurs during the REM state, and if you do it you are considered to have a “REM State Sleeping Disorder.”

Sleepwalking can occur outside of the REM state, during stages 3 and 4 of NREM, during that deepest sleep.  Specialists aren’t completely sure what causes the high-voltage delta waves that characterize sleepwalking.  Some think it is a reactionary condition brought on by exhaustion, fever, or something similar.  In some cases it is.  In other cases, somnambulism occurs because of much deeper seated problem.  For instance, many drug users are known to sleepwalk, and people with schizophrenia and anxiety disorders are more likely to be sleepwalkers.  New research shows that sufferers of Tourette Syndrome and frequent migraine headaches are more prone to sleepwalk.

So, what of these people who claim to have had sex, cooked, sent email, and even murdered in their sleep.  This is because, as we mentioned before, REM stage sleepwalking is one thing, but NREM sleepwalking is something else.  During that stage 3 and 4 sleep, the brain is supposed to be, for lack of a better term, quiet.  In a NREM state sleeping disorder, part of the brain wakes up, and causes the person to do all sorts of things.  If that person is predisposed or in the “right” mindframe, they certainly can be capable of murder.

And, given that certain types of insomnia are considered a mental illness, they’ll probably get away with it.

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