![]() ![]() ![]() Her tale is harrowing even with all those things working in her favor. Had she not had parents who could afford her care, not had insurance, not been in New York, not been white, not had a support system who could stay with her around the clock, not had access to doctors who were literally on the cutting edge of her condition, she very likely would not have recovered. It seems impossible that this happens so quickly, as ill as she becomes, but she was extremely lucky to have been who and where she was, and she will be one of the first to admit that fact. Susannah gets ill, spirals, is hospitalized, is finally diagnosed, and finally begins to recover all within the space of a year. The story itself takes place over the course of 2009. ![]() It was identified in 2007, but people believe it could have been with us for centuries - its symptoms sound so much like what used to result in involuntary confinement or exorcism or outright murder. It results in a cascade of symptoms, starting from something that looks like the flu to a range of major behavior disturbances to seizures to catatonia. Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is a terrifying thing - one of those autoimmune disorders where the body just goes into attack mode on itself for unknown reasons. As someone who has been both correctly diagnosed and misdiagnosed with conditions concerning my brain, I was really interested in Susannah Cahalan’s story once I heard about it (I’m also just a weird disease junkie in general). ![]()
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