by Susanna Cahalan
Published: Aug 2013
With this memoir, Susanna Cahalan accomplishes the extremely intimate and humbling task of piecing together her firsthand experience with an inexplicable and disabling illness. She suffers from seizures, paranoid hallucinations, and alexia (an inability to read) but perhaps the most unsettling aspect is that even top neurologists were at a loss in determining the cause. Though the bulk of her time inpatient escapes her memory, she puts her New York Post reporting skills to work, examining hospital security video, interviewing doctors and nurses and family members (who knew The Post wrote about more than nonsense celebrity gossip?). She does an excellent job of introducing and explaining medical and psychological terminology throughout the text making it an excellent candidate for required reading.
As someone who administers neuropsychological assessments for research studies, it was really interesting to get the patient's perspective on cognitive testing. She captures the frustration and the effort it takes to trudge through the mental fogginess incredibly (is it a spoiler to reveal her diagnosis? Here it is anyway, for the curious: Anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis.). The whole experience was also a piercing glance into the american healthcare system, and research-based western medicine as a whole: the terrifying reality that no matter how far we've come in understanding the human body, there is still so much we have yet to learn.
The whole narrative is reminiscent of Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight - a memoir written by a neuroanatomist who experiences a stroke. But I personally enjoyed Cahalan's write up SO MUCH MORE. Where Bolte Taylor uses the experience to confirm the existence of a higher power and feed her spirituality, Cahalan reflects more on the existential chaos that is first-person experience, our chaotic construction of reality via perception and the fallibility of memory. Now that's my jam.
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