And I've talked to many people who've had this disease, and one woman I spoke to actually asked for a priest because she said, 'The devil is inside of me. It wasn't far from Stephen's mind when he first saw that seizure. When you see videos of people - in fact, when I see videos of myself - demonic possession is not far from your mind. Even my grunts and these guttural sounds that came from me sounded superhuman to someone who might be inclined to think that way. In a lot of children, you see hypersexuality. "When you think about the symptoms - in my case alone, this grandiosity, this violence. On the possible connection between her rare immune disease and cases of "demonic possession" throughout history If everyone could have someone like that, it would just be a better world." I was so lucky to have someone there for me that could do that. At home, after a day at the hospital, she'd make a list of all the different terminology they used, and she'd look it up and, you know, not everyone is capable of doing that. She refused to see that as an answer, and so she did her own research. I mean she would not take 'no' for an answer, especially in the beginning when they were saying it was alcohol withdrawal and partying. "Without them, I wouldn't be here right now, especially with my mom. On being supported by her parents and boyfriend And then as the days went on, I stopped being as psychotic, and I started entering into a catatonic stage, which was characterized by just complete lack of emotion, inability to relate, or to read, or hardly to be able to speak." I believed all these incredibly paranoid - a huge, extreme example of persecution complex. And I believed that my father had murdered my stepmother. If I looked at them, wrinkles would form, and if I looked away, they would suddenly, magically get younger. I believed that I could age people with my mind. ![]() I could hardly walk, and when I did, I needed to be supported. At one point, I was like the Bride of Frankenstein - I kept my arms out rigidly. I didn't have proper control over my swallowing. On some of the symptoms she exhibited at the hospital that moment where kind of my memory goes dark." the difference between sanity and insanity. And so he turned me on my side and he called 911. And he had the presence of mind - and I think this is incredible - to know that this was a seizure because I had never had a seizure before. And I bit my tongue so that blood and kind of a combination of blood and foam was coming out of my mouth. And he saw that my eyes were wide open but completely unseeing, and at that point he tried to shake me and say, 'Are you OK, Sue? What's going on?' And at that point, my arms whipped out, and I had a grand mal seizure, and I was convulsing. And so he thought, 'Maybe she's just venting her frustration.' But the grunts were very unnatural sounding, so he turned and looked at me. He thought maybe I was just angry because I hadn't slept for days, and he knew that it was really frustrating. Stephen heard guttural sounds coming from me. "I don't remember anything from this experience. On the moment when Cahalan lost her sanity Your purchase helps support NPR programming. "I drew a circle, and I drew the numbers 1 to 12 all on the right-hand side of the clock, so the left-hand side was blank, completely blank," she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies, "which showed him that I was experiencing left-side spatial neglect and, likely, the right side of my brain responsible for the left field of vision was inflamed."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Brain On Fire Author Susannah Cahalan Souhel Najjar, who asked her to draw a clock on a piece of paper. Her symptoms frightened family members and baffled a series of doctors.Īfter a monthlong hospital stay and $1 million worth of blood tests and brain scans that proved inconclusive, Cahalan was seen by Dr. Grasping for an answer, Cahalan asked herself as it was happening, "Am I just bad at my job - is that why? Is the pressure of it getting to me? Is it a new relationship?"īut Cahalan only got worse - she began to experience seizures, hallucinations, increasingly psychotic behavior and even catatonia. In 2009, Susannah Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post, when she began to experience numbness, paranoia, sensitivity to light and erratic behavior. Susannah Cahalan is a reporter and book reviewer at the New York Post.
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