It is also the story of how one brilliant man, Syria-born Dr Najar, finally proved - using a simple pen and paper - that Susannah's psychotic behaviour was caused by a rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. Brain on Fire is Susannah's story of her terrifying descent into madness and the desperate hunt for a diagnosis, as, after dozens of tests and scans, baffled doctors concluded she should be confined in a psychiatric ward. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife that she could control time with her mind. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. ' Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming days and weeks, I would never again be the same person. 'My first serious blackout marked the line between sanity and insanity. Lahita, Women and Autoimmune Disease: The Mysterious Ways Your Body Betrays Itself (New York: Morrow, 2004). Massoud Mahmoudi, Immunology Made Ridiculously Simple (Miami: Med Master, 2009).
0 kommentar(er)
