Susannah Cahalan - Brain on Fire - My Month of Madness

Then, as I reached for the next letter, I caught sight of myself in the mirror of the armoire, wearing only a bra and underwear, clutching Stephen’s private love letters between my thighs. A stranger stared back from my reflection; my hair was wild and my face distorted and unfamiliar. I never act like this, I thought, disgusted. What is wrong with me? I have never in my life snooped through a boyfriend’s things.

I ran to the bed and opened my cell phone: I had lost two hours. It felt like five minutes. Moments later, the migraine returned, as did the nausea. It was then that I first noticed my left hand felt funny, like an extreme case of pins and needles. I clenched and unclenched my hand, trying to stop the tingling, but it got worse. I raced to the dresser to put away his things so that he wouldn’t notice my pilfering, trying to ignore the uncomfortable tingling sensation. Soon though, my left hand went completely numb.

The pins and needles, which persisted unabated over many days, didn’t concern me nearly as much as the guilt and bewilderment I felt over my behavior in Stephen’s room that Sunday morning. At work the next day, I commissioned the help of the features editor, Mackenzie, a friend who is as prim and put together as a character out of Mad Men .

“I did a really bad thing,” I confessed to her outside the News Corp. building, huddling under an overhang in an ill-fitting winter coat. “I snooped at Stephen’s house. I found all these pictures of his ex-girlfriend. I went through all of his stuff. It was like I was possessed.”

She shot me a knowing half-smile, flipping her hair off her shoulders. “That’s all? That’s really not so bad.”

“Mackenzie, it’s psycho. Do you think my birth control is causing hormonal changes?” I had recently started using the patch.

“Oh, come on,” she countered. “All women, especially New Yorkers, do that, Susannah. We’re competitive. Seriously, don’t be so hard on yourself. Just try not to do it again.” Mackenzie would later admit she was concerned not by the act of snooping itself but by my overreaction to having done it.

I spotted Paul smoking nearby and posed the same question. I could depend on him to tell it to me straight. “No, you’re not crazy,” he assured me. “And you shouldn’t be worried. Every guy keeps pictures or something from their exes. It’s the spoils of war,” he explained helpfully. Paul could always be counted on for a man’s perspective, because he is so singularly male: eats hard (a double cheeseburger with bacon and a side of gravy), gambles hard (he once lost $12,000 on a single hand at the blackjack table at the Borgata in Atlantic City), and parties hard (Johnnie Walker Blue when he’s winning, Macallan 12 when he isn’t).

When I got to my desk, I noticed that the numbness in my left hand had returned—or maybe it had never left?—and had moved down the left side of my body to my toes. This was perplexing; I couldn’t decide if I should be worried, so I called Stephen.

“I can’t explain; it just feels numb,” I said on the phone, holding my head parallel to my desk because my landline cord was so tangled.

“Is it like pins and needles?” he asked. I heard him strum a few chords on his guitar in the background.

“Maybe? I don’t know. It’s weird. It’s like nothing I’ve felt before,” I said.

“Are you cold?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, if it doesn’t go away, you should probably go to a doctor.” I rolled my eyes. This coming from the guy who hadn’t been to a doctor in years. I needed another opinion. When Stephen and I hung up, I swiveled my chair around to face Angela.

“Did you sneeze or bend over funny?” she asked. Her aunt had recently sneezed and dislocated a disc in her spine, which had caused numbness in her hands.

“I think you should get it checked out,” another reporter piped up from her desk nearby. “Maybe I’ve been watching too many episodes of Mystery Diagnosis, but there’s a lot of scary shit out there.”

I laughed this off at the time, but flickers of doubt danced in my head. Even though my colleagues were professional slingers of hyperbole, hearing the worry in their voices made me start to rethink my laissez-faire attitude. That day during a lunch break, I finally decided to call my gynecologist, Eli Rothstein, who had over time become more of a friend than a medical practitioner; he had even treated my mom when she was pregnant with me.

Most of the time Rothstein was laid back; I was young and generally healthy, so I was accustomed to his telling me everything was normal. But when I described my symptoms, the usual warmth dropped from his voice: “I’d like you to see a neurologist as soon as possible. And I’d like you to stop taking your birth control immediately.” He arranged for me to visit a prominent neurologist that afternoon.

Concerned by his reaction, I hailed a cab and headed uptown, the taxi zipping in and out of the early afternoon traffic before dropping me in front of an impressive Upper East Side building where doormen staffed a grand marble lobby. One doorman pointed me to an unmarked wooden door on the right. The contrast between the crystal-chandeliered entrance and the drab office was discomfiting, as if I had jumped back in time to the 1970s. Three unmatched tweed chairs and a light brown flannel couch provided seating. I chose the couch and tried to avoid sinking in at its center. A few paintings hung around the walls of the waiting room: an ink sketch of a godlike man with a long white beard holding an instrument that looked suspiciously like a surgical needle; a pastoral scene; and a court jester. The haphazard decor made me wonder if everything, including the furniture, had been dug up at a garage sale or pilfered from sidewalk castoffs.

Several emphatic signs hung at the receptionist’s desk: PLEASE DO NOT USE LOBBY FOR PHONE CALLS OR WAITING FOR PATIENTS!!!!!! ALL COPAYS MUST BE PAID BEFORE SEEING DOCTOR!!!!!!!

“I’m here to see Dr. Bailey,” I said. Without a smile and without looking at me, the receptionist shoved a clipboard in my direction. “Fill it out. Wait.”

I breezed through the form. Never again would a health history be so simple. Any medications? No. Allergies? No. History of surgery or previous illness? I paused here. About five years ago, I had been diagnosed with melanoma on my lower back. It had been caught early and required only minor surgery to remove. No chemo, nothing else. I jotted this down. Despite this premature cancer scare, I had remained nonchalant, some would say immature, about my health; I was about as far from a hypochondriac as you can get. Usually it took several pleading phone calls from my mom for me to even follow through on my regular doctor’s appointments, so it was a big deal that I was here alone and without any prodding. The shock of the gynecologist’s uncharacteristic worry had been unnerving. I needed answers.

To keep calm, I fixated on the strangest and most colorful of the paintings—a distorted, abstract human face outlined in black with bright patches of primary colors, red pupils, yellow eyes, blue chin, and a black nose like an arrow. It had a lipless smile and a deranged look in its eyes. This painting would stick in my mind, materializing again several more times in the coming months. Its unsettling, inhuman distortion sometimes soothed me, sometimes antagonized me, sometimes goaded me during my darkest hours. It turned out to be a 1978 Miró titled Carota, or carrot in Italian.

“CALLAAHAANN,” the nurse brayed, mispronouncing my name. It was a common, excusable mistake. I stepped forward, and she showed me to an empty examination room, then handed me a green cotton gown. After a few moments, a man’s baritone voice echoed behind the door: “Knock, knock.” Dr. Saul Bailey was a grandfatherly-looking man. He introduced himself, extending his left hand, which was soft but strong. In my own, smaller one it felt meaty, significant. He spoke quickly. “So you’re Eli’s patient,” he began. “Tell me what’s going on.”