Sleepwalking Turns Fatal, Woman Fractures Neck

A woman fell down the stairs while sleepwalking and broke her back, neck, jaw, cheekbones, eye socket and wrists.

Morag Fisher, 40, was taken to the trauma unit by an ambulance which her friend Carl Muggleton in Long Eaton, Derbys, called after finding her in a pool of blood. She was spending night at the friend's place. Fisher said, "I have sleepwalked before but usually I just wander around and then go back to bed, but because I was at a friend's house it was unfamiliar and I fell." She is recuperating at her home in Lincolnshire after a 10-day stay at the hospital.

To prevent incident like this, Fisher has now put up stair gates at her home. "Now, when I do look at myself I feel lucky to be alive and even luckier to be walking. It's a miracle I didn't die," she said.

Fisher's six-year-old daughter Olivia has been her support all this while and she was happy that her mother was again looking like before. Fisher kept sleeping throughout the incident and got up when paramedics woke her up in the ambulance. She wears a back brace to protect the spine and expects to get it removed in about six weeks.

Muggleton said he knew that she sleepwalked but never expected it to be so fatal. He jumped out of the bed on hearing the sound of the crash. Fisher is a customer services assistant and she expects to join back work in two months.

Around 10 million people in Britain suffer from sleepwalking, as per a study conducted last year. A study at Stanford University says nearly a third of American adults have sleepwalked at least once in their lives and about 3.6 per cent of adults of 8.5 million Americans sleepwalk at least once a year.

Source: Medindia