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Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness QUOTES

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

2 " I had asked him many times why he stayed, and he always said the same thing: “Because 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. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

3 " 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’s 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. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

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

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

5 " 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’s 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’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

6 " Maybe it’s true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

7 " Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

8 " there’s nothing worse than seeing pity radiating from the eyes of a former lover. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

9 " To move foward, you have to leave the past behind "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

10 " Our minds have the incredible capacity to both alter the strength of connections among neurons, essentially rewiring them, and create entirely new pathways. (It makes a computer, which cannot create new hardware when its system crashes, seem fixed and helpless). "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

11 " Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

12 " We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

13 " Someone once asked, "If you could take it all back, would you?"
At the time I didn't know. Now I do. I wouldn't take that terrible experience back for anything in the world. Too much light has come out of my darkness. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

14 " No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

15 " The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

16 " You have to look backward to see the future,” he often said to his residents.

--- stated by Dr Najjar. So true in many settings "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

17 " When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues--words, smells, images-- for them to be brought back as memories "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

18 " I am far, far away from here. I am myself again. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

19 " There are few other experiences that can bring two people closer than staring death in the face. • "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

20 " On April 2, the nurses started my first round of five intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusions. The clear IV bags hung on a metal pole above my head, their liquid trickling down into my vein. Each of those ordinary-looking bags contained the healthy antibodies of over a thousand blood donors and cost upwards of $20,000 per infusion. One thousand tourniquets, one thousand nurses, one thousand veins, one thousand blood-sugar regulating cookies, all just to help one patient. "

― Susannah Cahalan , Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness