Journalist pieces together her 'month of madness'

Susannah Cahalan found herself in a hospital with no memory of how she got there, or why

So writes award-winning New York Post journalist Susannah Cahalan (28) in her fascinating new book Brain on Fire. It details a time in her life several years ago when for weeks she knew something was not right with her then 24-year-old body. Her moods had changed and Cahalan put it down to a bad flu or the stresses of life as a young reporter in New York.

After her first identifiable seizure, everything in her life changed when she eventually found herself in a hospital with no memory of how she got there, or why. A succession of doctors and specialists struggled to identify her illness as one of the rarest auto-immune diseases in the world and it took a brilliantly personable specialist using just a pen and paper to unlock the mystery.

The disease in question is anti-NMDA-receptor auto-immune encephalitis and, when she was eventually diagnosed, Cahalan became only the 217th person in the world to be officially linked with the illness.

The disease resulted in her immune system attacking her brain, and the seizures, psychotic episodes and hallucinations that accompany it have led doctors to speculate it may have been the real cause of so-called “devil possessions” through the ages.

In her book, Cahalan describes what she calls “my month of madness” and reconstructs the period of her illness through interviews, medical records, hospital videos and journals.

As she was passed from specialist to specialist and the attempted treatment costs spiralled (eventually costing in the region of $1 million (€748,000), for which thankfully she had insurance) Cahalan’s illness remained a mystery to medics.

Some of the medical staff she met thought she may have had a combination of bi-polar and schizophrenia.

Animal-like state

Several weeks after her seizures began, Cahalan had turned into an animal-like state, kicking and punching those close to her, as her family and partner looked on helplessly. Her medical saviour would arrive in the guise of Dr Souhel Najjar, a neurologist at New York University’s medical centre. “I had a spinal tap and additional white blood cells showed up,” she explains.

“Meanwhile, I met Dr Najjar and he asked me to draw a clock and I drew all the numbers one to 12 on the right side of the drawing, but I left the left-hand side of the page blank. This proved to him that there was a problem with the right side of my brain and my left field of vision was impaired. He said at the time he thought it was encephalitis, but he needed to confirm there was inflammation in my brain. They did a brain biopsy and it was confirmed.”