Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness

by Susannah Cahalan

Paul could always be counted on for a man’s perspective, because he is so singularly male: eats hard (a double cheeseburger with bacon and a side of gravy), gambles hard (he once lost $12,000 on a single hand at the blackjack table at the Borgata in Atlantic City), and parties hard (Johnnie Walker Blue when he’s winning, Macallan 12 when he isn’t).

The ring had been a graduation gift from my stepfather—it was 14K gold with a black hematite cat’s eye, which some cultures believe can ward off evil spirits.

“I used to try to forget about you,” Randy “the Ram,” a washed-up pro wrestler played by a haggard Mickey Rourke, says to his daughter. “I used to try to pretend that you didn’t exist, but I can’t. You’re my little girl. And now I’m an old broken-down piece of meat and I’m alone. And I deserve to be all alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.”

The healthy brain is a symphony of 100 billion neurons, the actions of each individual brain cell harmonizing into a whole that enables thoughts, movements, memories, or even just a sneeze. But it takes only one dissonant instrument to mar the cohesion of a symphony. When neurons begin to play nonstop, out of tune, and all at once because of disease, trauma, tumor, lack of sleep, or even alcohol withdrawal, the cacophonous result can be a seizure.

The long-term ramifications of untreated seizures can include cognitive defects and even death.

Often people report feeling déjà vu and its opposite, something called jamais vu,

We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said.

I didn’t understand that doctors usually doubled—even tripled—such numbers because patients often lie about their vices. Instead of two drinks a night, he probably believed the number was closer to six.

Even during this time when I hardly recognize myself, there are still shadows of the real Susannah, a person who cares what her family and friends think, who doesn’t want to cause them pain.

“Routine is important to me, as is discipline without it I tend to go a little bit haywire.”

Now, years later, these Word documents haunt me more than any unreliable memory. Maybe it’s true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.”

Yes, I could probably have made the jump. But then I caught sight of a small Buddha that Giselle kept on the bathroom counter. It smiled at me. I smiled back. Everything would be all right.

The mind is like a circuit of Christmas tree lights. When the brain works well, all of the lights twinkle brilliantly, and it’s adaptable enough that, often, even if one bulb goes out, the rest will still shine on. But depending on where the damage is, sometimes that one blown bulb can make the whole strand go dark.

Just like everything else in the brain, it’s complicated. Or, as author William F. Allman put it in Apprentices of Wonder: Inside the Neural Network Revolution, “The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.”

Dr. Najjar always stressed the importance of getting a full health history from his patients. (“You have to look backward to see the future,” he often said to his residents.)

stoic

“I’m boring. I don’t have anything to say. I’m not interesting anymore,” I kept repeating. “You’re anything but boring,” my dad would often respond adamantly. It broke my father’s heart to hear me say such things. He told me a few years later, in that same backyard and under those same strings of lights, that he would cry himself to sleep thinking of those words. But no one, not even my father, could convince me otherwise. I was dull, no doubt about it. And being boring was perhaps the toughest adjustment to my new life.

There are few other experiences that can bring two people closer than staring death in the face.

Sometimes, just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.

I could tell that he felt sorry for me, and there’s nothing worse than seeing pity radiating from the eyes of a former lover.

The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, one day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.

People never change, they say. I remember when I was entering sixth grade and the guidance counselor called us into her office to talk about the transition from elementary school to middle school. She asked me to pick an emoticon out of a list of about fifty to describe how I felt on the first day of school. I picked “ecstatic,” the one with the wide-mouthed, full laugh. The counselor was surprised by my pick; this apparently was not a common choice. I had been ecstatic then, but would I pick ecstatic now? Or have I lost that spark after all? Is there a sliver of me that did not recover from the fire?

The study showed that subjects given leading information were more likely to answer incorrectly than those who weren’t. These findings have challenged the power of eyewitness testimony.

I like to believe what Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.”

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE