Brain on Fire Read Online Free

paused here. About five years ago, I had been diagnosed with melanoma on my lower back. It had been caught early and required only minor surgery to remove. No chemo, nothing else. I jotted this down. Despite this premature cancer scare, I had remained nonchalant, some would say immature, about my health; I was about as far from a hypochondriac as you can get. Usually it took several pleading phone calls frommy mom for me to even follow through on my regular doctor’s appointments, so it was a big deal that I was here alone and without any prodding. The shock of the gynecologist’s uncharacteristic worry had been unnerving. I needed answers.
    To keep calm, I fixated on the strangest and most colorful of the paintings—a distorted, abstract human face outlined in black with bright patches of primary colors, red pupils, yellow eyes, blue chin, and a black nose like an arrow. It had a lipless smile and a deranged look in its eyes. This painting would stick in my mind, materializing again several more times in the coming months. Its unsettling, inhuman distortion sometimes soothed me, sometimes antagonized me, sometimes goaded me during my darkest hours. It turned out to be a 1978 Miró titled Carota, or carrot in Italian.
    “CALLAAHAANN,” the nurse brayed, mispronouncing my name. It was a common, excusable mistake. I stepped forward, and she showed me to an empty examination room, then handed me a green cotton gown. After a few moments, a man’s baritone voice echoed behind the door: “Knock, knock.” Dr. Saul Bailey was a grandfatherly-looking man. He introduced himself, extending his left hand, which was soft but strong. In my own, smaller one it felt meaty, significant. He spoke quickly. “So you’re Eli’s patient,” he began. “Tell me what’s going on.”
    “I don’t really know. I have this weird numbness.” I waved my left hand at him to illustrate. “And in my foot.”
    “Hmmm,” he said, reading over my chart. “Any history of Lyme disease?”
    “Nope.” There was something about his demeanor that made me want to reassure him, to say, “Forget it, I’m fine.” He somehow made me want not to be a burden.
    He nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s have a look.”
    He conducted a typical neurological exam. It would be the first of many hundreds to come. He tested my reflexes with a hammer, constricted my eyes with a light, assessed my muscle strength by pushing his hands against my outstretched arms, and checked my coordination by having me close my eyes and maneuver my fingers to my nose. Eventually he jotted down “normal exam.”
    “I’d like to draw some blood, do a routine workup, and I’d like you to get an MRI. I’m not seeing anything out of the norm, but just to be safe, I’d like you to get one,” he added.
    Normally I would have put the MRI off, but today I decided to follow through. A young, lanky lab technician in his early thirties greeted me in the lab’s waiting room and walked me toward a changing area. He led me to a private dressing room, offered a cotton gown, and instructed me to take off all my clothes and jewelry, lest they interfere with the machinery. After he left, I disrobed, folded my clothes, removed my lucky gold ring, and dropped it into a lockbox. The ring had been a graduation gift from my stepfather—it was 14K gold with a black hematite cat’s eye, which some cultures believe can ward off evil spirits. The tech waited for me outside the changing area, smiling as he guided me to the MRI room, where he helped prop me up on the platform, placed a helmet on my head, tucked a blanket over my bare legs, and then walked out to oversee the procedure from a separate room.
    After half an hour of enduring repeated close-range booming inside the machine, I heard the tech’s faraway voice: “Good job. We’re all set.”
    The platform moved out of the machine as I pulled off the helmet, removed the blanket, and got to my feet, feeling uncomfortably exposed in just the