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Tracey Emin, My bed, 1998
Autoimmune Disease Acts Like Demonic Possession
Susannah Cahalan started feeling a bit off. Numbness on one side of the body, losing sleep, crying hysterically one minute and laughing the next. She went to get MRIs but they showed nothing. Things were getting a bit more strange.
Her boyfriend told her how at one point while they were watching a show together she started grinding her teeth, moaning, and biting her tongue until she finally passed out. He took her to the hospital and they found out it was a seizure. Her first of many. Things got worse.
She stopped eating, became paranoid and delusional, had more seizures in which blood would spurt out of her mouth. She was hospitalized (one nurse recalls that in the middle of the night while she was getting blood, Susannah sat up straigh and slapped her). Numerous tests were done and the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
That is until Dr. Souhel Najjar came into the picture. He asked her to draw a clock. When she showed him what she had drawn he knew exactly what was wrong with her. All the numbers were written on the right side of the clock face, and no numbers were on the left side.
She had anti-NMDAR encephalitis. The receptors in the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive reasoning, and the limbic system, or the emotional center of the brain, are under assault by the immune system. In other words, her body was attacking her brain. Nearly 90% of people that suffer from this go undiagnosed and it is more common in women.
Can i get a step by step on how to do this?
So far for me it’s been something like:
1. Become aware of how and when you tearing yourself down.
2. Now that you can catch yourself doing it. Offer counters to the negative self talk. A really useful thing I read was to talk to yourself almost the way you would child. Gentle and patient. Even when they fuck up.
3. Take time to celebrate your small accomplishments. You’ve been attacking yourself for every little mistake. Apply that same fervor to the positive things in your life. Did the dishes even though you didn’t want to? Fuck yeah! Got up and took shower? YES!!! You are taking positive steps to feeling better. Celebrate it.
4. Make lists of things you’re good at/ like about yourself. The first time I did this the only two things in my list we’re that I liked my hair and I had good friends. It was start.
5. Don’t beat yourself up if you screw up steps 1-4. It’s counter productive. When I catch myself calling my self stupid for some mistake or other my response now is,“We don’t talk to ourselves like that anymore. What’s something constructive that could actually help solve the problem.”
Most of the time that seems to work. Not always. But more and more Everytime.
I hope any of that made sense.
oh my goodness there are instructions!!
Omg I was doing this without knowing
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