Book #43: Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan

This is the book club book for June. I wouldn't have heard of it and probably wouldn't have picked it up otherwise. Susannah Cahalan writes about her seemingly random experience with a severe autoimmune disease that came out of nowhere and started attacking her brain. She began acting crazy and almost completely insane, and spent a month in the hospital where doctors tried to diagnose her without success. They thought she probably needed to go to a psychiatric ward, until one doctor came in and realized that the right side of her brain was inflamed and completely not working. They managed to treat her and she slowly recovered and came back to her normal self (although it took almost a year to fully get back to normal). She was/is a journalist for the New York Post, and she decided to write about her experience and to learn about the disease she had and what happened to her while she was in the hospital (none of which she actually remembers).

It was a pretty interesting story, but I feel like it could have been condensed in half and still been as interesting. It really didn't need to be a 250 page book. The whole story also seemed anticlimactic, since there wasn't a really obvious end to her situation--she was released from the hospital but was still needing tons of treatment, and slowly just trickled on to getting better. I also didn't think she wrote about the scientific/medical stuff in a very interesting way, although, of course, that's hard to do. But the very idea of her change from normalcy to being completely out of it and almost insane is gripping and scary and she does a good job of tracing how she descended in that direction. I liked how she wrote about her family and her boyfriend and how they were so devoted to her while she was in that state. She had only been dating her boyfriend for four months and yet he stuck with her and came to the hospital every night and helped her get back to normal for the year after she came home--I was pretty amazed.

The thing that really struck me was that her experience was really pretty similar to Dane's Kawasaki disease last fall. Her brain was inflamed and she was treated with steroids and IVIG; Dane had an autoimmune disease causing inflammation of the blood vessels and he was treated with IVIG. I just kept thinking about him and our experience in the hospital--very different from hers, but similar in the medical principles behind each disease.