Sleeping Beauty who slept for 64 days



It took almost two years for Nicole Delien’s family to find someone who could explain the mysterious illness that was making their little girl “sleep” for as long as 64 days. During those excruciating 21 months doctors diagnosed everything from West Nile to epilepsy.

Some even suggested that Nicole’s parents might be drugging her or somehow manipulating her sleep – an accusation that led to a report to Child Protective Services.

Finally, when the family was at their wits end, they found Dr. Michael Rancurello at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, who diagnosed Nicole, 17, with an exceedingly rare disorder called Kleine-Levin Syndrome. Rancurello wasn’t an expert in the syndrome, but by chance he’d already treated several patients with the disorder that periodically sends patients into a strange state in which they alternate between long stretches of actual sleep and periods of semi conscious delirium.

“In the beginning we thought she had the flu because she had flu-like symptoms and a high fever,” Vicki Delien, Nicole’s mom, told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie. “But then she just became, as the days progressed, more confused and lethargic. We didn’t know what was going on. “

No one knows exactly what is going wrong in the brains of KLS patients. What experts do know is that it strikes more than twice as many boys (70 percent) as girls and that patients can abruptly drop into a state in which they will sleep for as many as 20 hours a day - Nicole sometimes sleeps for 19 hours in a row - and then for a few hours pop into a sort of twilight state that is similar to what sleep walkers experience.

Rancurello describes this state as more of a delirium than a true period of wakefulness.

“It’s not really sleeping,” he told Guthrie. “If anybody’s come out of anesthesia or had an elderly family member who has had surgery and gets confused and talks out of their mind, that’s basically what this is. It is a delirium.”

Affected teens and their families are advised by the National Institutes of Health to wait out the syndrome, since it has been shown to resolve on its own in most cases. “Episodes eventually decrease in frequency and intensity over the course of eight to 12 years,” the NIH webpage on the disorder notes.

NYPD officer giving boots to homeless barefoot man

On a cold November night in Times Square, Officer Lawrence DePrimo was working a his post when he encountered an older, barefooted homeless man. The officer disappeared for a moment, then returned with a new pair of boots, and knelt to help the man put them on.
The act of kindness would have gone unnoticed and mostly forgotten, had it not been for a tourist from Arizona.

Officer DePrimo, 25,  was shocked at the attention. He was not warned before the photo went online; the department had not learned which officer was in the picture until hours later.

The officer, normally assigned to the Sixth Precinct in the West Village, readily recalled the encounter. “It was freezing out and you could see the blisters on the man’s feet,” he said in an interview. “I had two pairs of socks and I was still cold.” They started talking; he found out the man’s shoe size: 12.

As the man walked slowly down Seventh Avenue on his heels, Officer DePrimo went into a Skechers shoe store at about 9:30 p.m. “We were just kind of shocked,” said Jose Cano, 28, a manager working at the store that night. “Most of us are New Yorkers and we just kind of pass by that kind of thing. Especially in this neighborhood.”

Mr. Cano volunteered to give the officer his employee discount to bring down the regular $100 price of the all-weather boots to a little more than $75. The officer has kept the receipt in his vest since then, he said, “to remind me that sometimes people have it worse.”


Officer DePrimo never got his name that Wednesday. “He was the most polite gentleman I had met,” the officer said, adding that the man’s face lit up at the sight of the boots. Officer DePrimo offered him a cup of coffee, but “as soon as the boots were on him, he went on his way, and I just went back to my post.”