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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Susannah Cahalan is a young, up-and-coming reporter with the New York Post when she is suddenly struck with a deep panic: she’s convinced her boyfriend is cheating on her. The left side of her body is going numb. She’s struck by bouts of horrible nausea and seizures, and her mental state violently shifts from euphoric to depressive. Doctors shrugged it off as a young girl who partied too hard and worked too much, and it was months and months before she got an actual diagnosis.
I inhaled this book in a few short days. It's one part memoir, one part mystery, and one part commentary on modern medicine and the US medical system. You feel Susannah and her family's frustration as doctors dismiss her symptoms as alcohol withdrawal or misdiagnose her with everything from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia to epilepsy. It's a huge relief when she finally gets her diagnosis (and she is, eventually, treated and cured), but the road back to full health is as arduous as her path to an accurate diagnosis.
The third and final part of the book might be the least exciting, since the mystery of the illness has been solved, but it also raises some of the most important questions of the book. Can you ever fully recover, physically or emotionally, from such a debilitating illness? Susannah vividly recaps her attempts to return to work, interact with large social groups, and regain her sense of self, often with mixed outcomes. She makes it clear that her diagnosis was truly a miracle, but it did not cure the emotional damages she experiences as a result of her sickness.
The author also spends a good deal of time chronicling the experiences of those who were not so lucky: they remained misdiagnosed, and were either permanently disabled or dead. Susannah realizes how lucky she was to be at one of the best medical centers in the world, with some of the best-trained neurologists in the world, but she is also acutely aware that this is the luck of the draw. In an especially moving chapter, "Survivor's Guilt", Susannah writes about her guilt at being a survivor of her rare illness - she is the 217th person to be diagnosed with this particular ailment - while others who were born too soon, or in the wrong country or into the wrong economic class, suffered in the silence of misdiagnoses or apathetic medical care.
It's an astonishingly brave book.
I inhaled this book in a few short days. It's one part memoir, one part mystery, and one part commentary on modern medicine and the US medical system. You feel Susannah and her family's frustration as doctors dismiss her symptoms as alcohol withdrawal or misdiagnose her with everything from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia to epilepsy. It's a huge relief when she finally gets her diagnosis (and she is, eventually, treated and cured), but the road back to full health is as arduous as her path to an accurate diagnosis.
The third and final part of the book might be the least exciting, since the mystery of the illness has been solved, but it also raises some of the most important questions of the book. Can you ever fully recover, physically or emotionally, from such a debilitating illness? Susannah vividly recaps her attempts to return to work, interact with large social groups, and regain her sense of self, often with mixed outcomes. She makes it clear that her diagnosis was truly a miracle, but it did not cure the emotional damages she experiences as a result of her sickness.
The author also spends a good deal of time chronicling the experiences of those who were not so lucky: they remained misdiagnosed, and were either permanently disabled or dead. Susannah realizes how lucky she was to be at one of the best medical centers in the world, with some of the best-trained neurologists in the world, but she is also acutely aware that this is the luck of the draw. In an especially moving chapter, "Survivor's Guilt", Susannah writes about her guilt at being a survivor of her rare illness - she is the 217th person to be diagnosed with this particular ailment - while others who were born too soon, or in the wrong country or into the wrong economic class, suffered in the silence of misdiagnoses or apathetic medical care.
It's an astonishingly brave book.
A really interesting and honestly kind of terrifying read/listen. Listening to this after reading [b:The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery|18774002|The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery|Sam Kean|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385349835s/18774002.jpg|26573388] was especially interesting since that book discusses the brain in detail, so I felt I had a better understanding of what was going on.
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
tense
This is such a curious memoir... as the author's illness robbed her of her memories, she had to tell the tale of what happened to her as if researching a stranger's plight, through notes and the tales of witnesses.
Fascinating look into mental illness, autoimmune disease, and the brain. Smart, but easy to read.
i'm very emotional after finishing this and above all so happy and proud of susannah. i truly hope this book has helped research on this disease and other psychological and neurological issues that exist in this world. her and her loved ones have an insane strength.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
nice, short read.
in three separate neuro classes in college, this book was mentioned or recommended. NMDARs, man. they're really, REALLY important. i really appreciated Cahalan's delivery of what could have, in another person's hands, been a lot of technical neuro jargon. i get enough of that as it is. she breaks down every component of the disease in layman's terms, but also doesn't talk down to the reader, and once she's introduced a concept she expects you to understand it. nice.
she splits the book up into three parts, but they are not, as I expected them to be, a before-during-after division. the story is pretty compelling, and takes advantage of the foregone conclusion that she is going to be okay. as her condition spirals, the question isn't "will she recover?" (because she clearly has), but instead "how will she recover?"
go Dr. Najjar, we love a competent medical professional! boo dr. bailey! although (as she points out) dude was likely overworked to hell and rewarded for it, so let's take issue with american medicine and not with the doctor himself.
in three separate neuro classes in college, this book was mentioned or recommended. NMDARs, man. they're really, REALLY important. i really appreciated Cahalan's delivery of what could have, in another person's hands, been a lot of technical neuro jargon. i get enough of that as it is. she breaks down every component of the disease in layman's terms, but also doesn't talk down to the reader, and once she's introduced a concept she expects you to understand it. nice.
she splits the book up into three parts, but they are not, as I expected them to be, a before-during-after division. the story is pretty compelling, and takes advantage of the foregone conclusion that she is going to be okay. as her condition spirals, the question isn't "will she recover?" (because she clearly has), but instead "how will she recover?"
go Dr. Najjar, we love a competent medical professional! boo dr. bailey!