For years Susannah Cahalan’s unpredictable mood swings ruled her life.
“One moment I would be you know, kind of hysterically happy, and then the next moment I would be despondent. I couldn’t control my emotions,” she told CBS New York.
Cahalan was a young, healthy journalist who had a bright future. But she first noticed the changes to her behavior before she had her first seizure.
After that things took a twisted turn…
When she was hospitalized for the seizure, the young woman started punching nurses. She tried to escape.
But doctors became very worried when she started describing visions that weren’t really there. They worried that this young and otherwise healthy woman was losing her mind…
Thankfully one doctor knew better. Dr. Souhel Najjar, the director of neuroscience at Staten Island University Hospital, was the man who stopped her colleagues from institutionalizing the young woman.
Although Dr. Najjar said her symptoms could easily be interpreted as mental illness, he was able to read between the lines and knew something was wrong with Cahalan’s brain.
She was experiencing:
- Numbness on the left side of her body
- Near constant and debilitating mood swings – even at work
- Seizures and hallucinations that included her father beating her stepmother, Civil War paintings coming to life, and a smiling Buddha statue that taunted her while she was locked inside the bathroom
- Most people would assume that Cahalan had lost her mind. Maybe she was schizophrenic or something.
But Dr. Najjar connected the dots. The numbness was a major red flag the pointed to brain problems.
“It was difficult for me to accept the fact, as much as she was psychotic, that it was a pure mental disorder. I realized that’s when her disease started before she became psychotic,” Dr. Najjar said.
“I needed to prove to many doctors involved in her care before me that this was actually a neurological disease. I had to find a test in my mind that proved it.”
Then Dr. Najjar asked the young woman to draw a clock. His colleagues thought he’d gone nuts too…
Here drawing shocked everyone. All of the numbers appear on the right side of the clock face. She drew nothing on the left side. 1 through 12 are written in the first half hour of the hour.
Dr. Najjar explained that this was a function of the right side of the brain. He ordered a biopsy. That’s when the hospital found inflammation around blood vessels in her brain. That means…
“Disruption of the blood-brain barrier, which is essentially the wall between the periphery and the brain. It prevents harmful substances in the blood to enter into the brain.”
Cahalan’s own immune system was tearing down her brain. Her white blood cells thought her brain was a foreign and harmful object like a cancer or virus. This was very bad.
She was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Her brain was almost beyond repair. But she underwent immediate treatment and started taking the right medications.
Now Cahalan is her old self again. And she’s extremely grateful…
“I mean I could have been cognitively impaired and put in a nursing home for the rest of my life, and I’m not. I’m here, and I’m very grateful for that fact.”
Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis seems to target young adults and children most often. Women are four-times more at risk than men.
