“I wish I could understand my behaviors and motivations during this time,” she says, “but there was no rational consciousness operating, nothing I could access anymore, then or now.” Ten days after her first blackout, she was admitted to NYU’s Langone Medical Center where she spent twenty-eight days in the hospital’s advanced monitoring unit. Like a good thriller, Brain on Fire’s mercury quick chapters race through this mystery, gradually revealing Cahalan’s scary, disorienting illness.

“In essence, I was gone.”īefore it was over, she would miss seven months of work and rack up one-million dollars worth of medical bills. “Though I had been gradually losing more and more of myself over the past few weeks, the break between my consciousness and my physical body was now finally fully complete,” she writes. Then she began losing her short-term memory and hallucinating. A few days later, her left hand went numb.

This was all a prelude to the tempest building in Cahalan’s brain. That evening, after a day at the Post where she uncharacteristically spaced the “impossible to forget” weekly pitch meeting with her editors, Cahalan was struck by a sharp pain in her head “like a white hot flash of a migraine.” A few days later, she found herself snooping through her steady boyfriend’s emails, suddenly and inexplicably paranoid over his exes. It all began in early 2009 during New York’s bedbug scare, when Cahalan says she woke up one morning with “two red dots on the main purplish-blue vein” of her left arm. Using evidence gathered from interviews, medical records, journals, and hospital video cameras, she delivers an intense, mesmerizing account of survival in her new book, Brain on Fire. Unlike Esther, New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan says she remembers almost nothing of her terrifying brush with madness, but she’s no less haunted by it. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them,” Esther thinks. Near the end of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood recalls how her mother, mortified by Esther’s recent stay at an asylum, recommended they simply carry on as if nothing-the fits, the hallucinations, the suicide attempt-had ever happened.

The brain on fire book