Brain on Fire

by Cahalan, Susannah

  “Is it bad that my hand still feels tingly all the time?” I asked Angela again the next day at work. “I just feel numb and not like myself.”

  “Do you think you have the flu?”

  “I feel terrible. I think I have a fever,” I said, glancing at my ringless left finger. My nausea matched my anxiety about the ring. I was obsessed by its absence, but I couldn’t get up the nerve to call the office and hear that it was gone. Irrationally, I was instead clinging to that empty hope: Better not to know, I convinced myself. I also knew I was going to be too sick to make the trek later that night to see Stephen’s band, the Morgues, perform at a bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which made me feel worse. Watching me, Angela said, “You don’t look too hot. Why don’t I walk you home?”

  Normally I would have refused her offer, especially because it was Friday evening on deadline, which typically kept us at the office until 10:00 p.m. or later, but I felt so nauseous and sick and mad at myself that I let her escort me. The trip, which should have taken five minutes, today took a half-hour because after practically every other step I had to stop and dry heave. Once we got to my apartment, Angela insisted I phone my doctor to get some answers. “This just isn’t normal. You’ve been sick for too long,” she said.

  I dialed the after-hours hotline and soon received a phone call back from the gynecologist, Dr. Rothstein.

  “I do want to let you know that we’ve gotten some good news. Yesterday’s MRI came back normal. And we’ve eliminated the possibility that you had a stroke or a blood clot, two things that, frankly, I was worried about because of the birth control.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yes, but I want you to stay off the birth control, just to be safe,” he said. “The only thing that the MRI showed was a small amount of enlargement of a few lymph nodes in your neck, which leads me to believe that it’s some kind of virus. Possibly mononucleosis, though we don’t have the blood tests back to prove it yet.”

  I almost laughed out loud. Mono in my twenties. As I hung up, Angela was looking at me expectantly. “Mono, Angela. Mono.”

  The tension left her face and she laughed. “Are you kidding me? You have the kissing disease. What are you, like, thirteen?”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE WRESTLER

  Mono. It was a relief to have a word for what plagued me. Though I spent Saturday in bed feeling sorry for myself, I gathered enough strength the next night to join Stephen, his oldest sister, Sheila, and her husband, Roy, at a Ryan Adams show in nearby Montclair. Before the show, we met at a local Irish pub, sitting in the dining area underneath a low-hanging antique chandelier that let off little tufts of light. I ordered fish and chips, though I couldn’t even stomach the image of the dish. Stephen, Sheila, and Roy made small talk as I sat there, mute. I had met Sheila and Roy only a few times and hated to imagine what kind of impression I was making, but I couldn’t rouse myself to join the conversation. They must think I have no personality. When my fish and chips came, I immediately regretted my order. The cod, caked in thick fried batter, seemed to glow. The fat on it glinted in the light from the chandelier. The fries too looked sickeningly greasy. I pushed the food around on my plate, hoping no one would notice I wasn’t actually eating anything.

  We arrived early for the show, but the music hall was already crowded. Stephen wanted to be as close to the stage as possible, so he pushed forward through the crowd. I tried following him, but as I moved deeper into the horde of thirtysomething men, I grew dizzy and queasy.

  I called out to him, “I can’t do this!”

  Stephen gave up his mission and joined me at the back of the floor by a pillar, which I needed to support my weight. My purse felt as if it weighed forty pounds, and I struggled to balance it on my shoulder because there wasn’t enough space around me to lay it on the floor.

  The background music swelled. I love Ryan Adams and tried to cheer but could only clap my hands weakly. Two five-foot-tall neon blue roses hung in the background behind the band, burning into my vision. I felt the pulse of the crowd. A man to my left lit up a joint, and the sweet smell of smoke made me gag. The breath of the man and woman behind me flared hotly on my neck. I couldn’t focus on the music. The show was torture.

  Afterward we piled into Sheila’s car so she could drive us back to Stephen’s apartment in Jersey City. The three of them talked about how incredible the band had been, but I stayed silent. My shyness struck Stephen as strange; I was never one to keep my opinions to myself.

  “Did you like the show?” Stephen nudged, reaching out for my hand.

  “I can’t really remember it.”

  After that weekend, I took three more consecutive days off work. That was a lot for anyone, but especially for a newbie reporter. Even when the Post kept me out past 4:00 a.m. working on Meatpacking District club stories, I always made it to the office right on time a few hours later. I never took sick days.

  I decided to finally share my diagnosis with my mother, who was distressed when I told her about the numbness, particularly because it was only on one side of the body. I assured her it was only because of the mono. My father seemed less concerned on the phone, but on my third day off he insisted on coming into Manhattan to see me. We met at an empty AMC Theater in Times Square for an early showing of The Wrestler.

  “I used to try to forget about you,” Randy “the Ram,” a washed-up pro wrestler played by a haggard Mickey Rourke, says to his daughter.3 “I used to try to pretend that you didn’t exist, but I can’t. You’re my little girl. And now I’m an old broken-down piece of meat and I’m alone. And I deserve to be all alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.” Hot, wet tears ran down my cheeks. Embarrassed, I tried to control the heaving in my chest, but the exertion made me feel worse. Without saying a word to my father, I ran from my seat to the theater’s bathroom, where I hid in a locked stall and allowed myself to weep until the feeling passed. After a moment, I collected myself and headed out to wash my hands and face, ignoring the concerned rubbernecking of the middle-aged blond at a nearby sink. When she left, I stared at my image in the mirror. Was Mickey Rourke really getting to me? Or was it the whole father-daughter thing? My dad was far from affectionate, habitually avoiding using words like “I love you,” even with his children. It was a learned deficiency. The one time he had kissed his own father was when my grandfather was on his deathbed. And now he was taking time out of his busy schedule to sit beside me in an empty theater. So, yeah, it was unsettling.

  Get yourself together, I mouthed. You’re acting ridiculous.

  I rejoined my father, who didn’t seem to have noticed my emotional outburst, and sat through the remaining portion of the movie without another breakdown. After the closing credits, my father insisted on walking me to my apartment, offering to check it out because of the bedbug scare, though it was clear he was mainly concerned about my health and wanted to spend more time with me.

  “So they say you have mono, huh?” he asked. Unlike my mother, who reviewed New York magazine’s list of best doctors religiously, my father had always distrusted medical authority. I nodded and shrugged my shoulders.

  When we got near my apartment, however, my stomach filled with that inexplicable but now-familiar dread. I suddenly realized that I didn’t want him to come inside. Like most fathers, he had chastised me when I was a teenager about allowing my room to get filthy, so I was used to that. But today I felt ashamed, as if the room was a metaphor for my screwed-up life. I dreaded the idea of his seeing how I was living.

  “What the hell is that smell?” he said as I unlocked the door.

  Shit. I grabbed a plastic Duane Reade bag by the door. “I forgot to throw out the kitty litter.”

  “Susannah. You’ve got to get yourself together. You can’t live like this. You’re an adult.”

  We both stood in the doorway, looking at my studio. He was right: it was squalid. Dirty clothes littered the floor. The trash can was overflowing. And the black garbage bags, which I’d p
acked during the bedbug scare and before the exterminator had come to spray three weeks earlier, still covered the room. No bedbugs were found, and no more bites had surfaced. By now I was convinced it was over—and a small part of me had begun to wonder if they had ever been there at all.

  CHAPTER 5

  COLD ROSES

  I returned to work the next day, a Thursday, which gave me just enough time to finish up a story and pitch two more. Neither passed muster.

  “Please do LexisNexis searches first,” Steve wrote, responding to my new pitches.

  Insecurity is part of the job, I told myself. Reporters exist in a state of constant self-doubt: sometimes we have disastrous weeks when stories don’t pan out or sources clam up; other times we have killer ones, when even the seemingly impossible works out in our favor. There are times when you feel like the best in the business, and other times when you’re certain that you’re a complete and total hack and should start looking for an office job. But in the end, the ups and downs even out. So why was everything in such upheaval for me? It had been weeks since I felt comfortable in my own journalist skin, and that frightened me.

  Frustrated by my sloppy performance, I asked to go home early, again, hoping it was just the mono. Maybe a good night’s sleep would finally get me back to my usual self.

  That night I tossed and turned, filled with misgivings about my life. When my alarm clock rang the next morning, I hit the snooze button and decided to call in sick again. After a few more hours of sleep, I woke up rested and calm, as if the whole mono thing had been a distant nightmare. The weekend now loomed brightly on the horizon. I phoned Stephen.

  “Let’s go to Vermont.” It was a statement, not a question. Weeks earlier we had had plans to go to Vermont and stay at my stepbrother’s house, but since I had gotten sick, the trip had been postponed indefinitely. Sensing that I still wasn’t my old self, Stephen was offering reasons that we shouldn’t rush into the trip when a blocked call beeped in on the other line. It was Dr. Rothstein.

  “The blood test results came back. You are not positive for mononucleosis,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “So much better.”

  “Okay, then, it must have been some garden-variety virus that’s now out of your system.”

  Invigorated, I called Stephen back, insisting that we pack our bags and go away for the weekend. He caved. That afternoon we borrowed my mom’s black Subaru and drove four hours north to Arlington, Vermont. It was a perfect weekend: Saturday and Sunday mornings we went to a quaint local restaurant called Up For Breakfast, shopped at outlet malls, and hit the slopes—or, rather, Stephen snowboarded as I read Great Expectations in the lodge. On Sunday a snowstorm hit, so we were happily forced to stay another day, which meant more time off from work. Finally I agreed to ski, and Stephen led me to the top of a small mountain.

  I had skied a few times before and never found the intermediate slopes difficult to manage, though I was hardly an expert. But this time, as the wind whipped my face and the snowflakes burned my cheeks, the mountain suddenly seemed far steeper than ever before. It loomed out below me, long, narrow, and threatening. I felt instantly helpless, and I panicked, a kind of deep-seated fight-or-flight fear that I had read about but never experienced.

  “Ready?” Stephen’s voice sounded distant in the howling winds. My heart pounded in my ears, as I raced through ever-more-terrible scenarios: What if I never make it down? What if Stephen leaves me here? What if they never find my body?

  “I can’t do this,” I shouted. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me do this.”

  “Come on!” he said, but stopped his cajoling when he sensed my anxiety. “It’s okay. I promise you’ll be okay. We’ll take it slow.”

  I headed nervously down the mountain with Stephen following. Midway down, I picked up speed, feeling silly about my terror from moments before. Safe at the bottom a few minutes later, though, I recognized that this panic had been far more critical than just a fear of heights. Still, I said nothing further about it to Stephen.

  Monday night, back at my mother’s house in New Jersey, I was still having trouble sleeping, but now instead of nervous, I felt nostalgic. I riffled through old clothes and discovered I finally fit into pants that I’d only been able to pull up to my midthigh since sophomore year in high school. I must be doing something right, I thought gleefully.

  I would soon learn firsthand that this kind of illness often ebbs and flows, leaving the sufferer convinced that the worst is over, even when it’s only retreating for a moment before pouncing again.

  CHAPTER 6

  AMERICA’S MOST WANTED

  The next Tuesday morning at work, my office phone rang. It was Steve. He seemed to have forgiven me for my recent absence and displays of ineptitude, or at least had decided to give me another shot: “I want you to interview John Walsh tomorrow morning when he comes in for a Fox News interview. He’s working on a new episode about drug-smuggling submarines that I think could be a fun page lead.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to muster up the enthusiasm that had once come so naturally. It did sound exciting to interview the host of America’s Most Wanted, but I couldn’t seem to focus. The first thing I needed to do was a clip search, so I called the Post’s librarian, Liz. She is a researcher by day, Wiccan priestess by night. Inexplicably, instead of asking for a search, I requested a tarot reading.

  “Come on by,” she said languidly.

  Liz practiced modern witchcraft using candles, spells, and potions. She had recently been appointed Third Degree High Priestess, meaning she was able to teach the craft. She wore rows of pentacles and flowing Stevie Nicks–style clothes, and even donned a black cape in winter. She smelled of incense and patchouli and had drooping, trustworthy, puppy eyes. There was something attractive about her energy, and despite my innate skepticism of witchcraft and religion overall, I found myself wanting to believe.

  “I need your help,” I said. “Things are not going well. Will you do a reading?”

  “Hmmm,” she said, laying out a deck of tarot cards. “Hmmm.” She drew out each syllable. “So I see good things. Positive stuff. You’re going to have some sort of a job change. Something freelance outside the Post. Financially, I see good things for you.”

  Waves of calm coursed through my system as I concentrated on her words. I had needed someone to tell me that I was going to be okay, that these odd setbacks were just blips on the radar of my life. In retrospect, Liz may not have been the right person to go to for this kind of reassurance.

  “Oh, man. I feel all floaty,” Liz added.

  “Yeah, me too.” I did.

  When I returned to my desk, Angela looked depressed. A fellow Post reporter, our resident renaissance man who covered all sorts of beats for the paper, had passed away from melanoma. An e-mail was circulating throughout the newsroom, outlining the funeral arrangements for that Friday. He had been only fifty-three years old. It made me think of my own melanoma diagnosis, and for the rest of the day, even as I should have been researching John Walsh, I couldn’t force the sad news out of my mind.

  The next morning, after another sleepless night, I used the few remaining moments I had to prepare for the interview to Google melanoma relapse rates instead. I was completely unprepared when 9:50 a.m. hit, but I headed out to meet Walsh in an empty office down the hall anyway, hoping I could just wing it. As I walked through the hallway, framed Post front pages began to close in on me, their headlines contracting and expanding.

  BILL CHEATED ON ME!

  SPACESHIP EXPLODES MIDAIR, ALL 7 DIE

  DIANA DEAD

  THE KINK AND I

  CHILLARY

  The pages were breathing visibly, inhaling and exhaling all around me. My perspective had narrowed, as if I were looking down the hallway through a viewfinder. The fluorescent lights flickered, and the walls tightened claustrophobically around me. As the walls caved in, the ceiling stretched sky-high until I felt as if I were in a cathedral. I
put my hand to my chest to quell my racing heart and told myself to breathe. I wasn’t frightened; it felt more like the sterile rush of looking down from the window of a hundred-story skyscraper, knowing you won’t fall.

  Finally I reached the office where Walsh was waiting for me. He still had the makeup on from his Fox News interview, and it had melted a bit under the bright lights of the studio.

  “Hi, John, my name is Susannah Cahalan. I’m the Post reporter.”

  As soon as I saw him, I started wondering, oddly, if Walsh was thinking right then about his murdered son, Adam, who had been abducted from a department store in 1981 and found decapitated later that year. My mind wandered through this macabre subject as I stood smiling blandly at him and his manicured publicist.

  “Hello,” the publicist said, breaking my train of thought.

  “Oh, hi! Yes. My name is Susannah Cahalan. I’m the reporter. The reporter on the story. You know, on the drug smuggling, drug smuggling—”

  Walsh interrupted here. “Submarines, yes.”

  “He only has five minutes, so we should probably get going,” the publicist said, a hint of annoyance evident in her tone.

  “Many South American drug smugglers are making homemade submarines,” Walsh began. “Well, actually, they aren’t in fact submarines but submersible crafts that look like submarines.” I jotted notes: “Columbian” [sic], “homemade,” “track about ten a . . .” “Drug boats, we must stop boats . . .” I couldn’t follow what he was saying, so I mainly jotted down disassociated words to make it seem as if I was paying attention.

  “It is very cunning.”

  I laughed uproariously at this line, though I didn’t know then and still can’t figure out what about that word seemed so funny. The publicist shot me a puzzled look before announcing, “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt the interview. John needs to go.”