Sleepwalking mum woke up to find herself ‘gulping bleach like it was juice’

A sleepwalking mum woke up to find herself drinking a carton of BLEACH like it was juice.

Andrea Davison, 41, suffers from parasomnia – the term for performing abnormal activities while asleep.

She says her nighttime antics started while her father and father-in-law were battling cancer – becoming so extreme, she has even driven while fast asleep.

Andrea sleepwalking become increasingly extreme until she woke up drinking bleach from the bottle – leading medical staff to fear she was trying to commit suicide.

The mum, from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, discovered she had driven the six-minute journey to her mum's house and back while snoozing, so now has to hide her car keys at night.

Living alongside her four teenage sons, Andrea has become a source of entertainment as they wait until she's sound asleep before asking for money – knowing she'll forget what she agreed in the morning.

Andrea regularly wakes up to find morsels of food left over from midnight snacks or will come round suddenly to find herself stood in her garden in her pyjamas in the middle of the night.

Now the anxiety charity founder is speaking out about her late-night antics to show sleepwalking can be more dangerous than people think – and could risk lives.

Andrea said: "It's really scary. This isn't just typical sleepwalking.

"Everyone in the house is on guard for mum's next stunt.

"When I drank bleach, at that moment, I thought I was going to die. I thought I'd killed myself and that was it.

"It's crazy. I am always doing different things.

"Sometimes I don't wake up, I just do the thing then go back to bed. I've probably done loads of stuff I don't even know about."

Back in 2016, Andrea had just fought off kidney cancer and was caring for her dad, Arthur, who was tragically dying of the disease, aged 79.

One evening, after he had been rushed into hospital with heart failure, Andrea woke up to find herself downing a bottle of bleach.

Andrea said: "I had cancer a few years ago in my kidney, then a few months after that my dad was taken into hospital with heart failure.

"That night, I woke up drinking bleach. It had burned all my throat.

"I do eat in my sleep, I'm always eating, and I must have thought it was something to drink. I was holding the bleach bottle in one hand and a ginger nut biscuit in the other.

"I have no idea how much of that I'd drank, but I woke up gulping it down like it was juice.

"I tried to make myself sick then phoned an ambulance. The paramedics could smell it on my breath.

"They thought I'd done it on purpose to kill myself. They were saying 'sit down, it's okay, there's someone you can talk to'. I was insisting I had genuinely been asleep.

"Because my dad was dying, people thought I wasn't coping. It was a very bizarre place to be when I wasn't suicidal.

"The hospital gave me something to empty my stomach and I was violently sick."

She spent the night in Southend Hospital but was then released and thankfully made a full recovery.

The following year, after Arthur had passed away, Andrea had stayed with her mum Dorothy, 81, for a few months.


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