A FRENCH fairy tale goes that 16-year-old Princess Aurora was cursed to die by an evil fairy Maleficent. Yet three good fairies altered the imprecation into a deep, 100 years slumber.
The latter-day "Princess Aurora", however, doesn't come from France, but nearly 12,000 kilometers away in Indonesia. Instead of the fairy tale's spinning wheel, the curse began with an unknown cause.
Teenagers, according to the US's National Sleep Foundation (NSF), normally sleep between eight to 10 hours per-day.
But in Banjarmasin, the capital city of South Kalimantan, Siti Raisa Miranda has been sleeping much longer than normal teenagers need.
The 17-year-old girl whose nickname is Echa, has been spending more than a week straight to sleep, since Thursday (April 1st, 2021), and doesn't wake up to this day.
She stays asleep, although her parents have many times tried to get her up.
"She will wake up only to eat or go to the bathroom", Mulyadi, Echa's father, said in an interview with TV One, Friday (April 9).
When she looks a little bit restless while sleeping, it is a sign that she needs to go to urinate.
If that's the case, Mr Mulyadi and wife will take turns holding her up to the bathroom.
Echa is also used to chewing and swallowing food while in a state of sleep. "We alternately feed her", he continued.
Thing that made Mr Mulyadi and wife puzzle (and feel uneasy), was when her daughter experiencing seizures in her hand and neck while asleep.
They subsequently took her to the hospital. But after a three days treatment, Echa was brought home, still in a state of sleep.
"There is no cure. The doctors were as baffled as I was", Mr Mulyadi said.
Not only medical professionals, he and wife have also strove non-medical treatments for their daughter, and not get any results they want.
IT IS not the first time that Echa falls asleep in such a long time. In the previous four years, when Echa was only 13, she fell asleep for almost two weeks.
When she woke up, she was unable to recognize her parents, let alone other family members.
In December 2020, Echa spent four solid days to sleep. In February 2021, again, she overslept for one and a half days.
"In between the period of excessive sleep, she is very normal", Mr Mulyadi explained.
Echa is actually a bright student.
She recently scored 100 marks in maths exam in her school, a senior secondary school in Banjarmasin.
Echa likes to playing piano. She is also good at guitar.
Mulyadi, Echa's father, is a teacher, and her mother works as an aerobics instructor.
Suffering such a "sleeping beauty" syndrome, has caused Echa to can't wake up to this day. She missed a lot of things in her teenagehood, important events of her life.
So far, the only thing Mr Mulyadi and wife can do, is to adapt themselves to the rare syndrome suffered by their daughter.[sahrudin]
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