I’m walking down the street of a major American metropolis, bagel in hand, rushing to find a park bench so I can log in to Zoom. I look down at my feet, pause, and whip out my phone.
Perfect. This will do. *shutter click*
Leave it to a patch of dingy city sidewalk to embody my feelings of living with an inflamed brain.
Autoimmune encephalitis (AE) is a nightmare.
Internists don’t want to touch it. Psychiatrists look on with sympathy. And most neurologists would rather not acknowledge it at all, unless scores of paraclinical investigations are screaming in their face.
So you might begin to imagine how dejecting it feels to be the one actually living with this illness.
Two years ago this month, I was hospitalized for the first time. I was diagnosed with seronegative autoimmune encephalitis (AE). And I started 5 months of immunotherapy, roughly 5 years after my illness first began.
By November 2019, I thought the battle was won: I seemingly had all the answers to solve my medical mystery, which had been open since 2014. It was clear by that point that standard AE treatments had worked wonders to bring me back to my original baseline of good health and cognitive functioning. Sure, I knew relapsing was a possibility; but were that to happen, I figured that healing again would be as simple as resuming Rituxan.
“If you don’t already have trauma from living with this illness, well—we’re certainly giving you reason to have it now.”
This was said in jest by a hilarious cardiologist that attended to me during my hospital stay in January, in an attempt to add levity to the generally uncomfortable situation I was in. Some of this was due to the innate challenges of being hospitalized with autoimmune encephalitis (AE), while…
Each month usually has a general direction or theme that I can speak to; not so much April, however. It’s been a month of everything: healing, setback, haze, peace, struggle, stress, and growth. I’m not making a beeline from A to B, that’s for sure.
Despite the detours and the weird place I find myself today, I do have faith that I’m slowly making it through to where I want to be.
The plane lifts. Like many traveling for the first time since the pandemic began, anxious feelings churn beneath my calm exterior.
Is it safe to fly? Will I regret this later?
