Modern science has grown by leaps and bounds, with staggering advances happening every single year. Thanks to it, we can now live longer and healthier lives than ever possible before. We wholeheartedly rely on our doctors and nurses to help us reach our best possible state of health. But that doesn’t mean medical professionals are perfect - even the most skilled physicians and nurses can improperly diagnose a condition. And in that scenario, the consequences can be fatal.
Young and optimistic at 24 years old, Susannah Cahalan had her whole life ahead of her. And with a loving longtime partner by her side, she was ready to take on the world. But no one could have seen it coming when she was hospitalized for insanity. But Susannah’s condition was very different than what her doctors believed it to be. It was about to be the battle of her life.
It all began from the moment when Susannah began to experience indescribable sensations throughout her body. It was a disconcerting feeling, where it felt as if something was crawling all over her body, something she could not see with her naked eye. She assumed it to be a case of bed bugs.
With a clear culprit established in her mind, she immediately set out to establish things in its proper order - and finally get rid of the uncomfortable sensations. With an exterminator in tow, they searched out every inch of her apartment to look for the said bed bugs. However, this was quickly ruled out; the exterminator found nothing.
It only got worse from that point on. In addition to the crawling sensations, Susannah started to experience paranoia, hallucinations, and seizures so severe that it started interfering with her work. She became very lethargic and was in severe agony.
Susannah thought it best to seek professional medical help. She sought refuge in the confines of the institution, but even that brought her no solace. Her condition was only becoming increasingly worse, instead of better. It wasn’t long before she became violent with the staff.
And like a terrible ceaseless nightmare, her suffering was unending. Her aggression was not limited to just the hospital staff but went on to manifest towards the people who came to visit her. It even extended up to her friends and family. Susannah's health, both physical and mental, was dwindling down a grave road.
With her condition only getting increasingly worse and no cure in sight, Susannah's attending physicians were worried that she was on the verge of a mental breakdown. They suggested admitting her to a psychiatric facility, where she could hopefully get better treatment.
Susannah had a dismal road ahead of her, with her condition only getting worse and worse each time. Her friends and family thought she was doomed to spend the rest of her life locked up in the facility. The current Susannah was a bleak shadow of her once healthy and happy self. That’s when Dr. Souhel Najjar decided to take another look at Susannah’s condition.
Dr. Najjar turned out to be Susannah's saving grace. He wasn't going to pass the same judgment as of the doctors before him, and do an uninformed diagnosis. He knew her behavior was inexplicable, but that it wasn’t time to give up on Susannah just yet. He asked her to perform one simple task. And that task was going to be the determining factor in her life.
When Dr. Najjar had his first look at Susannah, he knew it in his heart that there was more to the tortured soul that was Susannah Cahalan. With his doctoral instinct in full throttle, he got to the task of determining Susannah's exact affliction. Dr. Souhel Najjar asked Susannah to draw a clock. And with that simple task, his suspicions were confirmed.
That one simple task turned out to be the saving grace for Susannah. Her apparent “insanity” was not true insanity, but rather, something else entirely. Her condition was an indisposition of the body, rather than of the brain. Susannah's condition had been misdiagnosed this whole time.
Dr. Souhel Najjar had asked Susannah to draw a simple clock. Drawing a round figure and writing numbers along its edge was a simple enough task to achieve. But what was peculiar about Susannah's rendition of a clock was that her clock showed all the numbers on the right side of its face. It was a clear indicator of brain damage.
Dr. Najjar's diagnosis finally turned out to be the correct one for Susannah's ailing self. He diagnosed her with Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis, a condition that causes the immune system’s antibodies to attack the brain.
Susannah's case was an entirely different one than what she had been diagnosed with. It was a shocking revelation to everyone involved. If Dr. Najjar hadn't followed his instincts and intervened, Susannah could have seriously fallen ill. If left untreated, she could've died.
And just in the nick of time, she received appropriate treatment. And almost like it was magic, she began to get better. She was on a successful road to recovery, and she was well and discharged out of the hospital in just a month.
Finally recovered, Susannah was once again back to her normal healthy self no less than a month later since she started getting the right treatment for her condition. Susannah went on to write a book detailing her experience. She aims to help others dealing with similar conditions through her book.
After getting cured, Susannah started speaking to groups about her experience with the illness. Her openness about the topic might save the lives of others suffering from other various untreated brain traumas.
Susannah realizes she was truly lucky in receiving her diagnosis and treatment in time. She's not part of the scary statistic of 15% who recover but suffer severe cognitive deficits, or even the 20% who suffer mild ones.
The experience has had an inexplicable change in her.“When I look at photographs of me ‘post-‘ versus pictures of me ‘pre-‘ there is something altered, something lost – or gained, I can’t tell – when I look into my eyes", she explains.
She’s fortunate to not be spending the rest of her life in an institution, or brain-damaged, or even worse, dead. She’s one of “the lucky ones” – who has been over to the dark side of the brain and survived. Thankfully, she is back to her former self once more, all because one doctor refused to give up on her!