How did that help him diagnose your condition?Ī: When I drew the clock, I squeezed all the numbers into the right half of the circle. Najjar came in, he asked you to draw a clock face on a piece of paper. I was experiencing photophobia, which preceded a massive seizure. Then one day I walked through Times Square and the lights were painfully bright. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. I'd also become paranoid that my boyfriend was cheating on me. Q: Did you know you were sick before your hospital stay?Ī: I knew something was wrong I was constantly tired and I'd developed numbness on my left side. We asked her to walk us through her journey. In her new book, Brain on Fire, Cahalan chronicles her terrifying ordeal and the desperate search for a cure. It took the brilliant neurologist Souhel Najjar, MD, to find the cause: Cahalan had a rare disease that caused her immune system to attack her brain. Her doctors had ordered a battery of blood tests and brain scans, but they revealed nothing. She had no clear memory of the previous few weeks, though her medical records showed that she'd been psychotic and violent before lapsing into a profound catatonia. In April 2009, Susannah Cahalan, a 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post, woke up strapped to a bed in a hospital room.
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