In Brain on Fire, the journalist reconstructs - through hospital security videotapes and interviews with her friends, family and the doctors who finally managed to save her life - her hellish experience as a victim of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. But the best reporters never stop asking questions, and Cahalan is no exception. "Her brain is under attack by her own body."Ĭahalan, who has since recovered, remembers almost nothing about her monthlong hospitalization - it's a merciful kind of amnesia that most people, faced with the same illness, would embrace. "Her brain is on fire," one doctor tells her family. Cahalan spent a month in the hospital, barely recognizable to her friends and family, before doctors diagnosed her with a rare autoimmune disorder. In addition to the violent seizures, she was wracked by terrifying hallucinations, intense mood swings, insomnia and fierce paranoia. In 2009, the New York Post reporter, then 24, was hospitalized after - there's really no other way to put it - losing her mind. It's hard to imagine a scenario more nightmarish, but for Cahalan the worst was yet to come.
Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth."
"My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened," Cahalan writes. He falls asleep, and wakes up moments later to find her having a seizure straight out of The Exorcist. It's a cold March night in New York, and journalist Susannah Cahalan is watching PBS with her boyfriend, trying to relax after a difficult day at work.
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