✤ 18 Apr 2025
✤ English | Spanish | Italian | Portuguese | thoughts
Outfit: school robes ✤
888 words ✤
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Why Lyanna had decided to join the healing internship was something even she didn't known when she signed up. Thinking about it as she walked down numerous flights of stairs and entered the library after her last class on Friday, the answer slowly came to her. Although people didn't try to beat her often or anything, trouble always seemed to sneak towards her like an invisible serpent ready to strike in those moments when she was unarmed. But most of all, she knew what it was like to feel pain, to suffer both mentally and physically, Lyanna had felt it all. And all obviously doesn't mean everything, but rather enough to crack you into a million pieces for too long.
Too long.
Scanning the shelves, titles of books blurry in front of her eyes, Lyanna focused her vision as soon as she saw the letter "N". Was there a book on narcolepsy? Probably not. That was what she had decided to research, one of the ailments on the list prof. Baird had given his new interns when he'd changed the program a bit and everyone had to sign up again. There were other interesting ones too, sure, but narcolepsy stuck out to Lyanna for one specific reason. She'd heard of it. She'd heard a doctor telling her parents that might've been the disorder they were dealing with, she knew how that felt. Nobody knew if the girl actually had it or not, as it went away soon enough, but memories of it never left her.
But maybe it had come back.
Lyanna had been an eleven-year old girl, not yet ready to go to Hogwarts, when she had it. Or, well, when they said it was possible. In reality that was not the case, but how could she have known without having researched it, and how could the doctors have known without seeing in the future and knowing that it would go away? They didn't. And even though after a while it was checked off the list of diseases, illnesses or temporary disorders she could've had, but never off the list of possible nightmares. And so, even with the dread that the following night
would be a sleepless one again, Lyanna knew what she had to do.
And still, it kept haunting her.
After the 2024-2025 Christmas break, the young Hufflepuff's life had gone from good to miserable in seconds. Her mother had disappeared. Her only friend at home was a flipping ghost. Her father had tried to hide everything from her for a while. Everything was simply upside down. So it stands to reason that when she came back, sleeping was the last thing Lyanna was worried about. One sleepless night became two, that became three... and that went on until she basically crashed out- laying on her bed in the Badger Bungalow on a normal weekday before dinner, the exhausted girl just fell asleep and didn't wake until lunch the next day. After many apologies, she went to the Hospital Wing for the rest of the day because one of the professors insisted on her doing so.
And then it gradually stopped.
After so many days and nights of fatigue, Lyanna started to sleep well again and very slowly things started to shift back to normal again. Even though the grief was still there, at least it was a step in the right direction. After finding a book that might help her, Lyanna sat down at a table with a rolled-up blank sheet of poster paper (or parchment idk) and finally found an entry on narcolepsy. "Narcolepsy impairs the ability of having a proper schedule of sleep cycles and causes great fatigue. One with this chronic disorder would suffer from falling asleep at inappropriate times and-" So that was what it was. A chronic sleep disorder. Those stupid doctors thought she had a sleep disorder?? Blinking for a moment, Lyanna looked back at the page.
Focus.
What she read next was a bit more interesting, something about the existence of two different types. "There are two types of narcolepsy. For type one, the main symptoms are EDS and cataplexy and/or having CSF orexin levels of less than 110 pg/ml." Of what that meant Lyanna hadn't the faintest idea, but it seemed rather important so she made a mental note to add it onto the poster she would soon start making. "Different from the former, type two is more prone to having sleep-related hallucinations. There are two different kinds, hypnogogic and hypnopompic." Huh, Lyanna would have to look up the meaning of those words in the dictionary or something, but in the meantime finishing the paragraph was more important. "It is important to keep in mind that people with narcolepsy sleep approximately as much as people without, but the quality of it is compromised." Right. Having enough information the girl set to work, making a poster that mirrored the most important aspects of narcolepsy but also something pretty to look at. After all, it wasn't as if people with that disorder were any worse than people without.
There. Done. After quickly looking up the words "hypnogogic" and "hypnopompic", Lyanna decided that she had learned enough for the day and was ready to finish her first task by presenting it to the school nurse Octavius Baird.
