Цитаты из книги «Разум в огне. Месяц моего безумия» Сюзанна Кэхалан

Однако, лежа на кровати в тот день, я вдруг совершенно неожиданно ощутила звонок в голове, мысль, заслонившую собой все вокруг: прочитать его почту.

Моя мама, циничная еврейка из Бронкса, агностик до мозга костей, клянется, что в тот момент ощутила присутствие Бога.

Болезнь научила меня одному: мне очень повезло. Я оказалась в нужное время в нужном месте.

I cringe when I recall these interactions, since my mom and I had always been inseparable, and I can only imagine how much it must have hurt her. I realize that I was still holding tightly on to an amorphous grudge against her for reasons that seem so meritless now. Though the hospital was a blur, residual anger from that time remained somewhere in my subconscious. Somehow I had convinced myself that she hadn’t spent enough time with me in the hospital, though this was neither fair nor true. On some level, her suffering, which she had buried so deeply, had begun to drain out of her unconsciously and onto me. The worst part was that the struggle didn’t end once the hospital stay was over; now she had to live with this hostile stranger, her own daughter, who had once been one of her closest friends. But instead of sympathizing with her pain, which certainly matched and may have even surpassed my own, I took her suffering as an affront—a sign that she could not handle how flawed the sickness had made me.

More than just the recovery of a memory, though, this was the turning point when my mom finally conceded how afraid she had been, revealing through her tears that she hadn’t always been certain that I would be “fine.” And with that simple, natural gesture, our relationship rounded a corner. She once again became my ultimate confidante, companion, and supporter. It took accepting how close I had come to death (something impossible before, because it was her survival mechanism to deny) to finally allow us to move forward together.

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.

Patients may be able to return to work, function in society, or even live on their own, but they feel that they have more difficulty doing the things that had once come organically, leaving them essentially still far away from the person they were before the illness.

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, one day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.

Some buried feeling unites me fiercely with that painting. I have since mounted it on the wall above me in the room where I write, and often I find myself staring off at it when I’m lost in thought. Maybe, even though “I” was not there to experience it for the first time, some part of me nevertheless was present during that museum visit, and maybe for that entire lost month. That idea comforts me.

<...> какой это дар - умение общаться!

Может, верно говорил Томас Мор: "Лишь тайна и безумие приоткрывают истинное лицо души".

Когда мы вернулись в палату, он вспомнил пословицу, которая помогла мне сосредоточиться на позитивном.
– Если тебе легко, что это значит? – спросил он.
Я молча взглянула на него.
– Значит, ты летишь в пропасть, – с вымученной бодростью проговорил он, наклоняя руку и показывая склон горы. – А если тебе трудно?
Еще один непонимающий взгляд.
– Значит, поднимаешься в гору.

I would never regain any memories of this seizure, or the ones to come. This moment, my first serious blackout, marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming weeks, I would never again be the same person. This was the start of the dark period of my illness, as I began an existence in purgatory between the real world and a cloudy, fictitious realm made up of hallucinations and paranoia. From this point on, I would increasingly be forced to rely on outside sources to piece together this “lost time.”
As I later learned, this seizure was merely the most dramatic and recognizable of a series of seizures I’d been experiencing for days already. Everything that had been happening to me in recent weeks was part of a larger, fiercer battle taking place at the most basic level inside my brain.

The healthy brain is a symphony of 100 billion neurons, the actions of each individual brain cell harmonizing into a whole that enables thoughts, movements, memories, or even just a sneeze. But it takes only one dissonant instrument to mar the cohesion of a symphony. When neurons begin to play nonstop, out of tune, and all at once because of disease, trauma, tumor, lack of sleep, or even alcohol withdrawal, the cacophonous result can be a seizure.

Reading these entries now is like peering into a stranger’s stream of consciousness. I don’t recognize the person on the other end of the screen as me. Though she urgently attempts to communicate some deep, dark part of herself in her writing, she remains incomprehensible even to myself.

“Forget you heard that, Susannah,” my dad said. “They have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.”

Not only did I believe that my family members were turning into other people, which is an aspect of paranoid hallucinations, but I also insisted that my father was an imposter. That delusion has a more specific name, Capgras syndrome, which a French psychiatrist, Joseph Capgras, first described in 1923 when he encountered a woman who believed that her husband had become a “double.”12 For years, psychiatrists believed this syndrome was an outgrowth of schizophrenia or other types of mental illnesses, but more recently, doctors have also ascribed it to neurobiological causes, including brain lesions.13 One study revealed that Capgras delusions might emerge from structural and circuitry complications in the brain, such as when the parts of the brain responsible for our interpretations of what we see (“hey, that man with dark hair about 5’10”, 190 pounds looks like my dad”) don’t match up with our emotional understanding (“that’s my dad, he raised me”). It’s a little like déjà vu, when we feel a strong sense of intimacy and familiarity but it’s not connected to anything we actually have experienced before. When these mismatches occur, the brain tries to make sense of the emotional incongruity by creating an elaborate, paranoid fantasy (“that looks like my dad, but I don’t feel like he’s my dad, so he must be an imposter”) that seems to come straight out of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Because the brain works contralaterally, meaning that the right hemisphere is responsible for the left field of vision and the left hemisphere is responsible for the right field of vision, my clock drawing, which had numbers drawn on only the right side, showed that the right hemisphere—responsible for seeing the left side of that clock—was compromised, to say the least. Visual neglect, however, is not blindness. The retinas are still active and still sending information to the visual cortex; it’s just that the information is not being processed accurately in a way that enables us to “see” an image. A more accurate term for this, some doctors say, is visual indifference:35 the brain simply does not care about what’s going on in the left side of its universe.

“Her brain is on fire,” he repeated. They nodded, eyes wide. “Her brain is under attack by her own body.”

Существование способности забывать так и не доказано: мы лишь знаем, что некоторые вещи не приходят на ум, когда мы того желаем. Фридрих Ницше