Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION
The existence of forgetting has never been proved we only know
that something's do not come to our mind when they want them to. - Frederick
Nietzsche
-Author's Note Page
What I didn't know then is that bug obsession can be a sign of
psychosis.
Pg. 8
But there likely was a pathogen of some sort that had invaded my
body, a little germ that set everything in motion. ... The doctors don't
actually know how it began for me. What's clear is that if the man had sneezed
on you, you'd most likely just get a cold. For me, it flipped my universe
upside down...
Pg. 9
I would never again be the same person. This was the start of
the dark period of my illness, as I begin an existence in purgatory between the
real world and a cloudy, fictitious realm made of hallucinations and paranoia.
From this point on, I would increasingly be forced to rely on outside sources
to piece together this "lost time."
Pg. 41
But it takes only one dissident instrument to mar the cohesion
of a symphony.
Pg. 41
"But this is an emergency room and we can't just keep her
to see... I'm sorry." ...The doctor
nodded patiently and departed to address the gunshot wounds and drug overdoses
that awaited him.
Pg. 44
Bipolar disorder. Even though it would have sounded groom at any
other moment now the idea was a relief. ... I spent the night in a state of
ecstasy. I had a name for what plagued me, and those two words, which fell off
the tongue so sweetly, meant everything.
Pg. 48
"Her EEG was completely normal," Bailey protested,
looking through my file. "MRI normal, exam normal, blood work normal. It's
all normal."
"Well, she's not normal," my mother snapped as I sat
there, quiet and polite with my hands folded in my lap.
Pg. 70
After the neurological exam, he extended his hand my mother and
said, "We'll figure this out. Susannah will be fine." My mother clung
to those words like a life raft.
Pg. 82
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.
Pg. 83
Though I was no previous history of mental illness, I was within
the age range for psychotic breaks, which tend to occur in the late teens or
early twenties, but also frequently happen later in life for women.
Pg. 83
"Transfer to psych [ward] if psych team feels this is
warranted." Like Dr. Arslan, she chose not to tell my parents about this
new suggestion.
Although many of these
findings were kepted from my family and me, it was clear that my place on the
epilepsy floor was becoming more and more precarious, just as the nurse had
warned my father, both because my seizures seemed to have stopped and because I
was such a difficult patient.
Pg. 92
In the few weeks since my strange symptoms had begun, my dad had
been spending much more time with me than usual. He was determined to support
me as much as possible, but it was taking a toll on him;
Pg. 95
Stephan thought the music might somehow help bring me back.
Instead, Every time I watched this DVD, it was as if for the first time. My
short-term memory had been obliterated,
Pg. 101
It was a strange relief
for her to finally have confirmation that something physical, as opposed to
emotional, was happening to me.
Pg. 108
I seemed to be able to pull myself together when I had visitors
but it would often leave me depleted and unable to communicate for hours
afterwards, as if I had devoted all my energy to acting normal.
Pg. 111
Although developed in the mid-1950s, the clock had been entered
into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders only in 1987 and is used to diagnose problem areas of the
brain in Alzheimer's, stroke, and dementia patients. Dr. Najjar handed me a
blank sheet of paper that he had ripped out of his notebook and said,
"Would you draw a clock for me and fill in all the numbers 1 through
12?"
Pg. 131
"Her brain is on fire,” he repeated. ... "Her brain is
under attack by her own body."
Pg. 134
If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to
get to this step, how many other people were going around untreated, diagnosed
with a mental illness or condemned to life in a nursing home or psychiatric
ward?
Pg. 151
I seem to realize that I wasn't getting it right, which
frustrated me deeply. It was clear that, for all my other impairments, I knew
that I was not functioning at the level I was used to.
Pg. 155
It was time to figure out what treatment to save me. If he
miscalculated I might never recover. He had spent the night deliberating about
what to do, waking up in sweats and rambling to his wife. He had finally decided
to act with abandon. He didn't want to wait for things to worsen; I was already
too close to the edge.
Pg. 162
Finally, here was the confirmation he had been waiting for all
these weeks: I was still in there.
Pg. 171
What did it feel like to be a different person?
Pg. 176
I remained silent for a large portion of the night, as Stephen,
Grisell, and my father chatted. Whenever they'd try to include me in the
conversation, I shook my head and returned to unconsciously smacking my lips
together.
Pg.194
The brain is radically resilient; it can create new neurons and
make new connections through cortical remapping, a process called neurogenesis.
Pg. 197
He was a wreck. When other family members called for updates he
would wave away the phone, certain that he would lose his hard-won composure
once he heard familiar voices.
Pg. 198
Perhaps because my dad had been more of a footnote in my life,
whereas my mom was a dominant force, it was easier for my father to engage with
this "new" me.
Pg. 200
"How are you?" people continued to ask me constantly.
How was I? I didn't even know who "I" was anymore.
Pg. 205
I was feeling like a billion dollars as ice under down the
subway stairway...
...to find my ex-boyfriend a few stairs below me. I had not
spoken to him since long before my illness.
"I'm sorry I didn't
call, but I didn't think you'd want to hear from me."
This should have been the perfect moment to run into an ex,
fresh out of the salon. But it was destabilizing and not in a good way. 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.
Pg. 216
How many children throughout history have been
"exorcised" and then left to die when they did not improve? How many
people currently are in psychiatric wards and nursing homes, denied the
relatively simple cure of steroids, plasma exchange, IVIG treatment, and, in
the worst cases, more intense immunotherapy or chemotherapy?
Pg. 223
Dr. Najjar, for one, is taking a link between autoimmune disease
and mental illness one step further: through his cutting-edge research, he
posits that some forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and
obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression are actually caused by
inflammatory conditions in the brain.
Pg. 225
The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold
on sanity and help this and how much we are at the other women are Brutus
bodies, which will inevitably, one day, turn on us for good. I'm a prisoner as
we all are.
Pg. 227
Autoimmune diseases are most likely the number one cause of
disability in women of all ages.
Pg. 229
The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure situated atop the
hippocampus, located at the sides of head above the ears in the temporal lobes,
is a structure intimately involved in emotion and memory, helping to choose
which memories should be kept and what should be discarded, based on which
events have traumatized or excited us.
Pg. 244
"When people think about a past event, they can incorporate
new information in their recollection, making a new memory," explained
psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Dr. Loftus has spent a lifetime working on the
assumption that memory is often inaccurate.
Pg. 244
Although the photographs established that the car had
encountered a stop sign, when Dr. Loftus questioned the subject, she inserted
intentionally misleading questions, like, "What color was the yield
sign?" 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.
Pg. 245
"You integrate fragments, scenes of things that you could
not truly remember." Similarly, a retrieval mechanism is triggered in the
brain when we see something recognizable. Smells or images will instantly
transport us back in time, unlocking forgotten memories.
Pg. 246
There was not one shred, one Iota, one shard of memory that
connected me with that museum visit. I could not recall going to the Met that
February day.
Pg. 248
The existence of forgetting has never been proved we only know
that something's do not come to our mind when they want them to. - Frederick
Nietzsche
Pg. 248
