Susannah Cahalan

The mind is like a circuit ofChristmas tree lights. When thebrain works well, all of the lightstwinkle brilliantly, and it__ adaptableenough that, often, even if one bulbgoes out, the rest will still shine on.But depending on where thedamage is, sometimes that oneblown bulb can make the wholestrand go dark.

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it__ important to always get a second opinion.While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It__ a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.

Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.

I had lost confidence and a sense of self. Who am I? Am I a person who cowers in fear at the back of a spin class, avoiding everyone__ gaze? This uncertainty about who I am, this confusion over where I truly was in the time line of my illness and recovery, was ultimately the deeper source of the shame. A part of my soul believed that I would never be myself, the carefree, confident Susannah, again.

I had asked him many times why he stayed, and he always said the same thing: __ecause I love you, and I wanted to, and I knew you were in there._ No matter how damaged I had been, he had loved me enough to still see me somewhere inside.

The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, on day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.