Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'Brain on Fire'.
The search index is currently processing. Current results may not be complete.
Found 1 result
-
Has anyone else watched the new television series "Black Box"? It's about a brilliant neurologist who's able to diagnose and treat people with very puzzling neurological and psychiatric symptoms while she herself battles with a bipolar diagnosis. The first episode I thought was okay . . . not life-changing, and the same with the second. But this most recent one (sorry . . . not certain what night it actually airs as I tend to set my DVR for most things so I can fast-forward through commercials) was encouraging in that it seemed to rip a page from many of our lives, and was a particularly spectacular nod to Suzanne Calhanan's "Brain on Fire." A woman is brought into the hospital with puzzling neurological symptoms . . . an MRI shows a "lesion" in one lobe of her brain, but without a biopsy they can't determine if it is a tumor, infection, or what. She checks herself out, only to return when she realizes that all she sees and all she intellectually recognizes is a "half-world," as though only what her right eye sees is all there is. The fictionalized brilliant Dr. Catherine Black has her copy three drawings, one of which is a clock; the patient draws only a half-clock, and like Suzanne Calhanan, puts all 12 numbers on that one half. They wind up doing a lumbar puncture and determine that her condition is the result of tuberculosis which has impacted her brain! Infection! I need to watch it again because, per usual, I was double-tasking, so I'm not sure if they truly did leave out a lot of the intermediary information/diagnostic steps (skipped them for the sake of time in a 60-minute series), or if I just missed hastily provided information because I was splitting my focus. At any rate, I was truly pleased to see even a fictionalized account that tied infection to psychiatric manifestation, treated it, and saw the issue resolve (with therapy, by the way, which was also part of the treatment plan).
