Initially diagnosed with mononucleosis, Cahalan continued to grow worse, eventually suffering a series of near-fatal seizures, psychosis, and a gradual loss of brain function. Her left hand went numb, paranoid thoughts obsessed her mind, and migraines and stomachaches beset her body.

It mandated that insurance companies cannot refuse coverage to individuals for any reason, and also insisted that insurance companies pay for many services that anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis patients require, including hospitalization, prescription medications, and rehab and laboratory services.In 2009 Susannah Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old reporter at the New York Post, one of the country's oldest newspapers, when she suddenly developed a range of worrying symptoms. When President Obama signed 'Obamacare' into law in 2010, it eliminated some of the struggles that Cahalan and other patients likely faced during and after their treatment. When Cahalan became ill, the Affordable Care Act had not yet been put in place.

Cahalan mentions in the memoir that she was lucky to have good insurance through her job and well-off parents when she became ill, as her treatments cost upwards of one million dollars. Because of Dalmau's research and the success of Cahalan's memoir, the disease is now more heavily studied and is included on many standard autoimmune testing panels. Several doctors described the disease in children in papers in the 1970s and 1980s, but most patients were diagnosed with either unexplained psychosis or encephalitis. Josep Dalmau in 2007, though many doctors and researchers believe that it's been around as long as humans have. Cahalan married Stephen Grywalski in 2015, and the two live in Jersey City, New Jersey.Īs Cahalan explains in the book, anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis was first discovered by Dr. The alliance seeks to educate both patients and medical practitioners about the disease, as well as connect current patients to survivors. To this end, she worked with two other families whose children developed the disease to create a nonprofit organization called the Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance in December of 2012. Cahalan's illness and luck obtaining a diagnosis instilled in her the desire to spread her story as far as possible.

Cahalan made a full recovery and, after writing a first-person account of her experience for the New York Post, she turned her article into her memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. She was only the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed with the disease. In 2009, she became suddenly ill with a rare autoimmune disease, anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis. She began interning at the New York Post as a teenager and was hired full-time as a reporter in 2008. Cahalan attended Washington University in St. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and both remarried.

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