She also used the people who were there to support her at the time her parents, her friends, and her boyfriend to help her gather the puzzle pieces of those weeks where her memories were unreliable. Her recollection of the whole process was muddy and she had to piece together a lot of what she went through from her father’s journal, notes from her various doctors, and EEG videotapes of moments in the hospital.

Souhel Najjar on her team fighting to uncover what was truly wrong with her. Cahalan’s life could have been a lot different if she didn’t have Dr. It’s amazing to think that even in the 21st century there are diseases that are treatable but still undiagnosable. Susannah’s experience of being misdiagnosed and almost being written off as terminally mentally ill and condemned to a psychiatric ward for the remainder of her life was most likely the norm for many young women at the time, and before 2007, due to the lack of information and research that was conducted before then. Susannah became the 217th patient worldwide to ever be officially diagnosed with the specific form of encephalitis which was only put on paper two years earlier. That final diagnosis was anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis which at the time was only being diagnosed and studied by a single neuro-oncologist Dr. Though I had moments of hypochondria while Susannah was going through her long diagnosis process, it was amazing to read about her whole journey from when she began having minor symptoms to when she was finally diagnosed. It was shortly afterward that I decided to crack it open and I devoured it in two sittings. This book was recommended to me by my best friend who read it herself after we graduated from college and for my birthday this last year she sent me a copy to read myself. Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness is an amazing memoir about journalist Susannah Cahalan’s battle with rediscovering herself after an uncommon-at-the-time brain disease took away almost all she was in a matter of a few weeks.

The brain on fire book