It’s that time of year when everyone seems to be coughing and sneezing, but for a 12-year-old girl from Virginia, she can’t sit for more than a few seconds without someone saying "bless you."It’s so bad, on a regular day Lauren Johnson can sneeze more than 12,000 times a day.
"I can't stop sneezing. It goes off about eight to nine times a minute," Lauren said.
The condition, described as "machine gun sneezing," started about two weeks ago when the sixth-grader caught a cold and ever since then she’s been miserable.
"I know this is terrible for her," Lauren’s mom, Lynn Johnson said.
Lauren hasn’t been able to go to school and has visited six different doctors since the non-stop sneezing began. Although there’s no clear diagnosis, one neurologist told the family Lauren’s condition could be "irretraceable psychogenic disorder," which could be triggered by stress, according to the report.
"There's less than 40 cases ever documented ever in the entire world," Johnson said. "Nobody really knows how to treat it, what's going to work, and even in the cases where it might have worked or turned the sneezing off for awhile, a lot of times it comes back again and then you're right back to where you started," she added.
However, there are a few hours when Lauren does not sneeze."It turns off when she sleeps," her mom said. "Only in a deep REM sleep it turns off."
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