VIDEO: 12-year-old girl can’t stop sneezing
Published 11:00 am Saturday, October 10, 2015
The parents of Katelyn Thornley have probably stopped saying “Bless you.”
Not because they’re impolite, but because it would almost as exhausting as the ordeal their 12-year-old daughter is enduring.
For more than three weeks, the seventh grader from Angleton, Texas has been sneezing uncontrollably all day long. She’s currently averaging 20 sneezes per minute.
Thornley said trying to control the urge to sneeze is painful. Sleeping is difficult. Eating is difficult. Playing the clarinet impossible. She’s had to quit the swim team. She’s even quit going to school for fear of being a distraction.
Doctors believe Thornley’s condition may actually be a tic.
“She had kind of a funny feeling that she described in her nose and that piece of her history is very common for tics,” child neurologist Dr. Mered Parnes told ABC News.
“She had an episode … where it was 45 straight minutes,” her father Travis Thornley said. “She was screaming in pain a couple of time and all I can do is just hold her tight and wait for her to go to sleep.”
