Coming Back

Finished Susannah Cahalan's Brain On Fire a couple of days ago and have been thinking about her experience of a mental breakdown in relation to my own quite a bit since. I'm sure that the causes of our breakdowns were different, hers being firmly identified as Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis and mine being firmly not anything definite. (Well, I'm labelled epileptic, but the doc who attached the label was quite clear that the label was the best he could do but it wasn't exactly firmly stuck on.)

I can see why Stacey who leant me the book thought that the diagnosis therein might be meaningful in my case, especially given what she'd heard me recount of my experience, but I was struck by the huge dissimilarities - most of all by how limited my particular ordeal had been compared to that of Ms Cahalan. I suffered no protracted onset of psychosis and my recovery was almost instant compared to hers. She took months to recover her sense of identity - mine came to me within two or three days, I think, from when I fully came round in ICU and there was a distinct sense of everything clicking back into place when I became me again. I vividly recall the conversation with the nurse that precipitated my re-arrival and the accompanying assurance that I wasn't going to go off anywhere again soon.

The question of what constitutes identity is, as far as I'm concerned, the most thought-provoking of the memoir and it's a strange feeling applying it to myself, something it had never really occurred to me to do until now. But I'm now aware that it's a real question in my case. If I found myself on coming out of the Delirium and knew with such certainty I was back, then who was I when I was lost? To whom did that anxiety-ridden, baffled consciousness belong? Obviously another version of myself, but where has he gone?

Oh, and something else I now realise. Since my recovery was so real, so definite, so complete I came to take it for granted that it was somehow guaranteed, part of the nature of things, like casting off a cold. But perhaps it wasn't. Was I just lucky? Did the doctors work a version of accidental magic? (I say this not in a critical spirit but simply because they all seemed so surprised at my sudden sanity.)