Cahalan’s story has helped lead to others’ diagnosis, including Emily Gavigan (far left), whose father, Bill (between Emily and Cahalan), urged doctors to test her for autoimmune encephalitis after reading Cahalan’s Post article. I have not been brave enough to throw my brain into the fire. Looking at it now, I think of the Epicurus quote: “Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.” The brain sat in my living room until I moved to a new house, where it sits on a writing desk in my cluttered office. What would it take to prove that I had overcome? I put the brain candle on my bookcase and made a mental note to burn it as soon as I got the chance. I had done everything possible to prove my mastery over that broken brain: I had written a book, spoken endlessly in lecture halls and medical school auditoriums, and sat through the surreal experience of watching my book adapted into a movie.
#Brain on fire novel movie#
Cahalan (left) was played by Chloë Grace Moretz (right) in the movie version of “Brain on Fire.” Months later in my apartment in Brooklyn, holding that brain in my hands, I was touched by the sentiment but also, despite myself, wounded by it. It took him a beat to think of someone who would beneft from such a candle. The key was to burn them when the person was ready to move on. James couldn’t understand it all, but he came away with instructions: They were meant to represent the overcoming of a trial. He asked the two women who worked there about the shop’s strange organ candles-a femur bone, a lung, even a kidney. James bought it during a trip to Lisbon at one of the oldest candle shops in the world. Souhel Najjar, Cahalan’s doctor, joined the author for a Q-and-A session at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016.
I examined the yellow, fillet-sized mass in my hands until the object came into focus: it was an anatomically correct brain with wrinkly grooves and two identical hemispheres. A candle? But this had no botanical scent or wick, no obvious way to hold a flame.
“It’s a candle,” my brother, James, said. I stared at the unwrapped gift, struggling to recognize what I was holding.
#Brain on fire novel update#
Here, Cahalan shares an excerpted update from the 10th-anniversary edition of the book, out later this month. Her story, including a remarkable recovery, turned into the 2012 best-selling memoir “Brain on Fire” and later a movie of the same name. In 2009, Susannah Cahalan - then a Sunday reporter at The Post - wrote about her “ mysterious lost month of madness.” After a spate of numbness, sleeplessness, wild mood swings, psychosis and seizures, she spent a month in the hospital, misdiagnosed with serious mental illness, before doctors discovered she was the 217 th person in the world to be diagnosed with a newly discovered brain disease: autoimmune encephalitis. Groundbreaking Alzheimer’s drug may open up a ‘new era’ for treating disease My son has a brain tumor - a strange symptom led us to his diagnosis son whose brain was ‘obliterated’Ĭan you find the 3 pandas without sunglasses?
Adoptive mother, husband charged with murder of 5-year-old Pa.
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