Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Author:   Susannah Cahalan
Publisher:   Turtleback Books
Edition:   Bound for Schools & Libraries ed.
ISBN:  

9780606356695


Pages:   266
Publication Date:   06 August 2013
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness


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Author:   Susannah Cahalan
Publisher:   Turtleback Books
Imprint:   Turtleback Books
Edition:   Bound for Schools & Libraries ed.
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 20.80cm
Weight:   0.340kg
ISBN:  

9780606356695


ISBN 10:   060635669
Pages:   266
Publication Date:   06 August 2013
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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It's a cold March night in New York, and journalist Susannah Cahalan is watching PBS with her boyfriend, trying to relax after a difficult day at work. He falls asleep, and wakes up moments later to find her having a seizure straight out of The Exorcist. My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened, Cahalan writes. I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth. It's hard to imagine a scenario more nightmarish, but for Cahalan the worst was yet to come. In 2009, the New York Post reporter, then 24, was hospitalized after -- there's really no other way to put it -- losing her mind. In addition to the violent seizures, she was wracked by terrifying hallucinations, intense mood swings, insomnia and fierce paranoia. Cahalan spent a month in the hospital, barely recognizable to her friends and family, before doctors diagnosed her with a rare autoimmune disorder. Her brain is on fire, one doctor tells her family. Her brain is under attack by her own body. Cahalan, who has since recovered, remembers almost nothing about her monthlong hospitalization -- it's a merciful kind of amnesia that most people, faced with the same illness, would embrace. But the best reporters never stop asking questions, and Cahalan is no exception. In Brain on Fire, the journalist reconstructs -- through hospital security videotapes and interviews with her friends, family and the doctors who finally managed to save her life -- her hellish experience as a victim of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. The result is a kind of anti-memoir, an out-of-body personal account of a young woman's fight to survive one of the cruelest diseases imaginable. And on every level, it's remarkable. The best journalists prize distance and objectivity, so it's not surprising that the most difficult subject for a news writer is probably herself. And although she's you


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