History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s. Susannah Cahalan More Quotes by Susannah Cahalan More Quotes From Susannah Cahalan 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. Susannah Cahalan littles needs thinking Maybe it's true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed. Susannah Cahalan madness mystery soul On April 2, the nurses started my first round of five intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusions. The clear IV bags hung on a metal pole above my head, their liquid trickling down into my vein. Each of those ordinary-looking bags contained the healthy antibodies of over a thousand blood donors and cost upwards of $20,000 per infusion. One thousand tourniquets, one thousand nurses, one thousand veins, one thousand blood-sugar regulating cookies, all just to help one patient. Susannah Cahalan healthy nurse blood The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. Susannah Cahalan neurons brain beautiful To move foward, you have to leave the past behind Susannah Cahalan behinds past moving When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues--words, smells, images-- for them to be brought back as memories Susannah Cahalan smell fire memories We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it. Susannah Cahalan virtue failing body I knew something was wrong; I was constantly tired, and I'd developed numbness on my left side. I'd also become paranoid that my boyfriend was cheating on me. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. One psychiatrist told me I was bipolar. Susannah Cahalan thought me tired cheating We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category. Susannah Cahalan you personality brain people Hormones get no respect. We think of them as the elusive chemicals that make us a bit moody, but these magical little molecules do so much more. Susannah Cahalan more think moody respect In Greek myth, a chimera is a creepy combination of lion, goat, dragon - in humans, chimeras are one person who contains two sets of DNA. That's right. One person comes up in tests as two different people. Susannah Cahalan lion person different people I believed that I could age people with my mind. If I looked at them, wrinkles would form, and if I looked away, they would suddenly, magically get younger. Susannah Cahalan wrinkles age mind people The true story of how my husband, Stephen, and I exchanged our first 'I love you's' - chronicled in my 2012 memoir 'Brain on Fire' - occurred deep in a hallucinatory psychotic episode outside a crowded Maplewood, NJ, restaurant. Susannah Cahalan you fire brain love The first neurologist I saw just thought I was partying too much, and he stuck by that claim even after my family insisted that he was wrong. Susannah Cahalan wrong thought family too-much When my disease nearly destroyed me in 2009, my doctors thought I'd be lucky to regain 80 percent of my cognitive abilities. When I was at my sickest, I couldn't read or write. I could barely walk on my own or groom myself. The disease felled me physically and mentally - robbing me, briefly but intensely, of my wits, my sanity, my memory, my self. Susannah Cahalan walk myself me self To see my story turned into a movie is mind-blowing. Susannah Cahalan mind-blowing story see movie For me, I think that there's a lot missing from the recovery or the post-diagnosis side of treating patients. Once the diagnosis is made, I feel that care drops off tremendously, even though it is precisely the time that a patient needs help the most, even if they are not verbalizing it. Susannah Cahalan feel me care time NMDA receptors are concentrated in the areas that control learning and memory, higher functions like multitasking, and some of the more subtle aspects of personality. When the immune system makes antibodies that attack these receptors, people may have seizures and violent fits. Susannah Cahalan memory learning personality people My own medical history during my hospital stay was readily available to me through literally thousands of pages of medical records that outlined everything from my 'bowel releasing' schedule to the minute details of my brain biopsy procedure. Susannah Cahalan me medical brain history I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself. Susannah Cahalan about myself distance writing
