The brain sat in my living room until I moved to a new house, where it sits on a writing desk in my cluttered office. What would it take to prove that I had overcome? I put the brain candle on my bookcase and made a mental note to burn it as soon as I got the chance. I had done everything possible to prove my mastery over that broken brain: I had written a book, spoken endlessly in lecture halls and medical school auditoriums, and sat through the surreal experience of watching my book adapted into a movie. Cahalan (left) was played by Chloë Grace Moretz (right) in the movie version of “Brain on Fire.” Months later in my apartment in Brooklyn, holding that brain in my hands, I was touched by the sentiment but also, despite myself, wounded by it. It took him a beat to think of someone who would beneft from such a candle. The key was to burn them when the person was ready to move on. James couldn’t understand it all, but he came away with instructions: They were meant to represent the overcoming of a trial. He asked the two women who worked there about the shop’s strange organ candles-a femur bone, a lung, even a kidney. James bought it during a trip to Lisbon at one of the oldest candle shops in the world. Souhel Najjar, Cahalan’s doctor, joined the author for a Q-and-A session at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016. I examined the yellow, fillet-sized mass in my hands until the object came into focus: it was an anatomically correct brain with wrinkly grooves and two identical hemispheres. A candle? But this had no botanical scent or wick, no obvious way to hold a flame.
“It’s a candle,” my brother, James, said. I stared at the unwrapped gift, struggling to recognize what I was holding. Here, Cahalan shares an excerpted update from the 10th-anniversary edition of the book, out later this month. Her story, including a remarkable recovery, turned into the 2012 best-selling memoir “Brain on Fire” and later a movie of the same name.
In 2009, Susannah Cahalan - then a Sunday reporter at The Post - wrote about her “ mysterious lost month of madness.” After a spate of numbness, sleeplessness, wild mood swings, psychosis and seizures, she spent a month in the hospital, misdiagnosed with serious mental illness, before doctors discovered she was the 217 th person in the world to be diagnosed with a newly discovered brain disease: autoimmune encephalitis. Your brain actually works harder as it dies: scientific discovery My baby’s skull was broken into pieces - scary condition parents should know aboutĭoctors perform first-ever, life-saving brain surgery on baby in wombĪI’s next terrifying advancement is reading your mind
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