Netflix has released the movie Brain on Fire, which is based on a true story, where a New York Post journalist has a an illness in her brain.  Susannah Cahalan, a woman in her early twenties has just started her dream job at the New York Post. Out of nowhere (not much after she began her job,) she had hallucinations, seizures, memory loss, and paranoia. None of the doctors that Susannah sees can figure out what is actually going wrong. Only one doctor alone finally figured out the cause of Susannah’s symptoms back in 2009. The real life doctor who diagnosed Susannah is named Dr. Souhel Najjar. He discovered that the right side of her brain had become inflamed, which occurred because of an auto-immune disease called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Cahalan said, “I was only the 217th person on the world to be treated for the disease”.

This rare condition is sadly often even more severe than it was for Susannah.  Many people who get it never recover and about 13 percent of adults who do recover eventually relapse. Cahalan was treated with intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy, plasmapheris and steroids, but she wondered about all the other patients who might be suffering from the same mysterious disease. According to the same study, 80% of patients have partial or complete recovery. Some patients now took up to 18 months to recover. However, Recovery is slow and can take up months or even years.