A 7-year-old boy from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, recently woke up from an 11-day slumber that left doctors scratching their heads.
When Wyatt Shaw finally woke up, the second-grader had trouble speaking and moving around, but has since made good progress and is expected to make a full recovery.
After attending his aunt’s wedding and being the life of the party, Wyatt’s mother, Amy, expected him to sleep in the next day, but she never imagined that it would take 11 days for him to finally wake up. She tried waking him up several times, but Wyatt just couldn’t stay awake, and even though he sometimes opened his eyes, it just seemed like he wasn’t really aware of anything.
“He was awesome, he stole the show. He stole the last dance — he took the bride away from the groom,” Amy Thompson recalled about the wedding before her son’s mysterious sleep marathon. “Monday I tried to wake him up, and he fell back to sleep. I’d say, ‘Wyatt, Wyatt, Wyatt!’ And he fell back to sleep again. It was horrible.
Realising that there was something wrong with her son, Thompson took him to a doctor, who, after hearing her story, immediately sent them to Norton Children’s Hospital in Louisville, where the boy continued to sleep for 10 straight days. Doctors initially suspected a virus or bacteria, since the boy had apparently complained of stomach pain and headaches before falling into the deep sleep, but all the tests came back clean.
Thompson told USA Today that Wyatt “was just having electric misfires in his brain and it was just causing him to stay in a constant sleep,” so doctors used new medication usually used for helping with seizures to wake him up, and after 11 days, the boy finally came out of his unusual slumber.
The second-grader couldn’t move or speak, at first, but with the help of the medical staff and the support of his family, he has made great strides on his road to a full recovery. He still has problems speaking some words and can only walk with the help of his mother, but he is getting better every day.
But the mystery surrounding the cause of Wyatt Thompson’s 11-day slumber still remains, and doctors say that we may never know what happened, so they and the boy’s family are focusing on his recovery now.
The bizarre case is just as bizarre as the mysterious “sleeping syndrome” that has been plaguing Kalachi village, in Kazakhstan, where people routinely fall into a deep sleep for up to six days in a row.