Doctors Thought She Was Going Crazy. Then They Asked Her To Draw A Clock And It Was Clear

Symptoms

In 2009, Susannah Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post, when she began to experience numbness, paranoia, sensitivity to light and erratic behavior. Grasping for an answer, Cahalan asked herself as it was happening, "Am I just bad at my job is that why? Is the pressure of it getting to me? Is it a new relationship?"

Mental disorder

Everyone around Susannah Cahalan was deeply saddened when it looked like the bright, young, up-and-coming journalist began suffering from what appeared to be a severe mental disorder.

Going insane

On the moment when Cahalan lost her sanity

"I don't remember anything from this experience. This was all told to me after the fact. [My boyfriend] Stephen heard guttural sounds coming from me. He thought maybe I was just angry because I hadn't slept for days, and he knew that it was really frustrating. And so he thought, 'Maybe she's just venting her frustration.' But the grunts were very unnatural sounding, so he turned and looked at me. And he saw that my eyes were wide open but completely unseeing, and at that point he tried to shake me and say, 'Are you OK, Sue? What's going on?' And at that point, my arms whipped out, and I had a grand mal seizure, and I was convulsing. And I bit my tongue so that blood and kind of a combination of blood and foam was coming out of my mouth. And he had the presence of mind and I think this is incredible to know that this was a seizure because I had never had a seizure before. And so he turned me on my side and he called 911. And [that's, for me] ... the difference between sanity and insanity ... that moment where kind of my memory goes dark."

On some of the symptoms she exhibited at the hospital

"I slurred my words. I drooled. I didn't have proper control over my swallowing ... I kept my arms out in unnatural poses. At one point, I was like the Bride of Frankenstein I kept my arms out rigidly. I was slow. I could hardly walk, and when I did, I needed to be supported ... I started [acting] very psychotic. I believed that I could age people with my mind. If I looked at them, wrinkles would form, and if I looked away, they would suddenly, magically get younger. And I believed that my father had murdered my stepmother. I believed all these incredibly paranoid a huge, extreme example of persecution complex. And then as the days went on, I stopped being as psychotic, and I started entering into a catatonic stage, which was characterized by just complete lack of emotion, inability to relate, or to read, or hardly to be able to speak."

Miracle

However, one doctor, Souhel Najjar, thought there might be another cause of Cahalan's erratic behavior. If he was right, her condition was entirely treatable, and biological in nature.

In order to test his theory, he asked Cahalan to draw a clock. The result showed him what the true problem was.

Immune system disorder

The problem was obviously with the left side of Cahalan's brain. However, it wasn't brain damage causing the problem. It was an immune system disorder.

"Disruption of the blood-brain barrier, which is essentially the wall between the periphery and the brain. It prevents harmful substances in the blood to enter into the brain," Dr. Najjar explained.

Back to normal

With proper drugs to regulate her immune system, Cahalan returned to normal and is now living a completely normal life with no long lasting effects from her ordeal.

"I mean I could have been cognitively impaired and put in a nursing home for the rest of my life, and I'm not. I'm here, and I'm very grateful for that fact," she said.

Since the ordeal, Cahalan has written a book about her experience entitled, "Brain on Fire." Dr. Najjar has founded one of the first clinics in the country dedicated to treating similar brain auto-immune diseases.

Here is a video report