![]() She had a solid family support structure, and a boyfriend who was there for her every step of the way, even though they had just started dating. What I respected was her acknowledgement that she was lucky, on so many levels. With her family dedicated to her, they shared a common journal in her hospital room to record moments they recorded when they visited with her, seizures, and events that went beyond understanding for a healthy human body, comparing these journaled events with shocking camera footage to decode a pattern, anything to explain why Cahalan was besieged with this medically "new," disease. The "madness" that descended upon the author, one that tested a relationship with her new boyfriend, and also assuredly bonded her once estranged parents, became a goal to combine efforts to figure it out together, in collaboration with doctors who believed. Something within the auto-immune disease category, but more specifically the unique and rare anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.īut even though medical communities might slowly be familiar with this, science is still unfolding pieces every day for more awareness, how to manage it, and one day, hopefully a cure. Historically over the past 100 years, there is an unexpected number of documented cases of young women who suddenly were filled with "hysteria." A notion befitting a 1900s novel on high society, women with fainting spells, however in today's advanced medical community, doctors and nurses and researchers might have a tiny inkling of reasonable and sound evidence to prove something significant. How it happened still is a mystery encased in medical riddles continuing to be untangled today about an auto-immune disease we know it happens to primarily young women, but other than that, there is no true and consistent understanding. Doctors diagnosed her as bipolar, manic depressive, with her conditions of erratic behavior leading to fainting and seizures were frantically increasing at an alarming rate. Her life as she knew it, how she was leading it and loving it, was gone. ![]() A month that turned into more time erased, a life re-drawn into something maniacal. Pieces of each day began to fragment into moments that increased doubt in her own confidence and undeniable fear at the unknown of what happened to her, the question of what was happening in her body that plagued her, possessed her, but the most terrifying is that it appeared out of nowhere. Memories erased, speaking was impossible, moving was not allowed, nor was she able to even if she tried: she was strapped to the hospital bed. At 24 years old, just as she was truly making a name for herself in journalism in New York City, she awoke to find herself strapped in a hospital bed, completely unaware of what had happened to her. ![]() What's most frightening is Cahalan's complete inability to understand or control, what was happening to her. Brain on Fire, now a Netflix film starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Thomas Mann, and Tyler Perry, is easily one of the most unnerving medical books I've read in a while.
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