A 26-year-old man wound up with facial paralysis after wasting several
nights watching the World Cup football games for an entire week.
The World Cup is always an exciting time for football fans all over the
world, but keeping up with the action is a huge challenge, especially
during the group stages, and even more so when the host country is in a
very different time zone. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t die-hard
fans out there who will sacrifice sleep for nights in a row to make sure
they don’t lose a single game. Unfortunately, that can take a terrible
toll on one’s body, as a 26-year-old man in China recently learned at
his own expense.
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Mr. Cao, a Chinese football fan from Wuhan, in Hubei province who lost
not one night but an entire week’s worth of sleep trying to watch all
World Cup games, wound up in the hospital with facial paralysis. Even
though China didn’t even qualify for this year’s World Cup, Cao would
make it a priority to drive straight home after work and watch the games
from around 6 pm to 6 am, and then go to work a couple of hours later.
The 26-year-old man was fine for a few days, but it wasn’t long before
he started noticing that the lack of sleep was taking a toll on him. And
by that time it was already too late.
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“On November 30, I slept for two hours after watching the match, and
when I woke up, I felt extremely tired,” the man told reporters. “I
didn’t think much about it and decided to rest for a bit in the office,
but after a while, my condition didn’t seem to improve and it was
affecting my work progress.”
Sadly, the worse was yet to come. At one point, Cao felt his lips
suddenly tilting to the side, and became unable to move his eyelids. He
didn’t panic, thinking that it was only temporary, but the symptoms only
got worse and started interfering with his work, so he finally decided
to go to the hospital.
Mr. Cao was diagnosed with facial paralysis and needed to undergo
specialized treatment to mitigate the symptoms, but he is expected to
eventually make a full recovery. Doctors believe that the accumulated
lack of sleep, coupled with cold weather and a strong breeze caused the
paralysis and advised other football fans not to follow Cao’s example.
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