Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

by Susannah Cahalan

(We know, horribly, what happens when the frontal lobe is impaired because of the controversial lobotomy surgeries practiced in the 1950s and 1960s. One such method, the “ice pick” lobotomy, made infamous by Rosemary Kennedy, was a procedure in which a doctor would peel back the patient’s eyelid, insert a metal spike above the eyeball until it hit the top of the orbit, and then tap, tap, tap into the brain for several minutes. This imprecise procedure severed several frontal lobe connections, yielding results ranging from dulled emotions to childish behaviors.

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.

An alarming majority of autoimmune diseases—around 75 percent—occur in women, affecting us more than all types of cancer combined. Autoimmune diseases are most likely the number one cause of disability in women of all ages.

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.”