He asked the two women who worked there about the shop’s strange organ candles-a femur bone, a lung, even a kidney.

James bought it during a trip to Lisbon at one of the oldest candle shops in the world. Souhel Najjar, Cahalan’s doctor, joined the author for a Q-and-A session at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016. I examined the yellow, fillet-sized mass in my hands until the object came into focus: it was an anatomically correct brain with wrinkly grooves and two identical hemispheres. A candle? But this had no botanical scent or wick, no obvious way to hold a flame. “It’s a candle,” my brother, James, said. I stared at the unwrapped gift, struggling to recognize what I was holding.

Here, Cahalan shares an excerpted update from the 10th-anniversary edition of the book, out later this month. Her story, including a remarkable recovery, turned into the 2012 best-selling memoir “Brain on Fire” and later a movie of the same name. In 2009, Susannah Cahalan - then a Sunday reporter at The Post - wrote about her “ mysterious lost month of madness.” After a spate of numbness, sleeplessness, wild mood swings, psychosis and seizures, she spent a month in the hospital, misdiagnosed with serious mental illness, before doctors discovered she was the 217 th person in the world to be diagnosed with a newly discovered brain disease: autoimmune encephalitis. My baby’s skull was broken into pieces - scary condition parents should know aboutĭoctors perform first-ever, life-saving brain surgery on baby in wombĪI’s next terrifying advancement is reading your mind I’m a weight-loss coach- this type of woman can’t maintain success

Susannah cahalan books