Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
The Rat’s Revenge
The Vanishing Hand
Into My Brain
Derailed
Poisoned
Lost
Inferno
Chanterelles
What Happened, Miss Simone?
The Light Gets In
Survivor
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Authors
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Barbara K. Lipska and Elaine McArdle
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
Photographs throughout the book are courtesy of the author. The illustration on page 7 is © Witek Lipski.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lipska, Barbara K., author. | McArdle, Elaine, author.
Title: The neuroscientist who lost her mind : my tale of madness and recovery / Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054093 (print) | LCCN 2017046211 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328787279 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328787309 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Lipska, Barbara K.—Health. | Melanoma—Patients—Biography. | Brain metastasis—Patients—Biography. | Neuroscientists— Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Neuroscience. | PSYCHOLOGY / Mental Health. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical.
Classification: LCC RC280.M37 (print) | LCC RC280.M37 L57 2018 (ebook) | DDC 616.99/4770092 [B]— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054093
Cover Design by Mark R. Robinson
Photographs courtesy of the author
eISBN 978-1-328-78727-9
v1.0318
To Mirek, my rock
To science, for saving lives
In memory of Witold,
for whom scientific advances came too late
Prologue
I’m running and running and running. For hours, I’ve been running. I want to get home but I have no idea where that is, even though I’ve lived in this neighborhood for twenty years. So I keep running.
I’m roaming these tree-lined streets in suburban Virginia at a fast clip, wearing my usual outfit—a tank top and running shorts. I sweat as my pace increases, faster, then faster still, my heart pounding but my breath even and unhurried as I sail past large homes with two-car garages and bicycles parked in driveways.
It’s the end of spring 2015 and the beginning of what will become a particularly hot and humid summer. The grass on the immaculately trimmed lawns is still green and lush. Pink and white peonies are in full bloom, and all around me azaleas explode in a rainbow of colors.
I’ve jogged this route hundreds of times over the past two decades. I should recognize each maple tree and camellia bush on each street corner, and every gash in a curb where a teenage driver took a corner too fast. They should be landmarks as familiar to me as anything in my life. But today it’s as if I’ve never seen them before.
When my husband and I bought our home here twenty-five years ago, just two years after leaving the grimness of Communist Poland, this normal American suburb seemed a dream come true. What luxuries it contained! Settled into our new home, we quickly adopted a middle-class American lifestyle, complete with regular meals of Chinese takeout and buckets of ice cream—indulgences that were nonexistent in Eastern Europe.
One day, I saw a photo of myself—arms chubby and dimpled, thighs spread across my chair—and was shocked into a major lifestyle change. I needed to get more exercise, and I began to run. Not one for minor shifts in my life, I decided I would enter a race as soon as I was able.
At first, I couldn’t jog a single block. Within a year, I was running three miles. After two years, I signed up for my first race, a six-mile competition where I finished at the top of my age group. Since then, my entire family has become dedicated athletes. Runners, cyclists, and swimmers, we’re always training for one competition or another.
And so, each morning, I run.
A creature of routine, I always start by taking my German-made prosthetic breast from the shelf in my bathroom. I’ve worn the breast ever since undergoing a mastectomy following a battle with breast cancer in 2009. Fashioned from high-tech plastic, it is flesh-colored and feels like a real breast, and it is proportioned to match the breast on my right. It even has a tiny nipple. Engineered for athletes, it’s light and has a special adhesive on the underside to hold it on to my body. Every morning before my jog, I slap it into place on the smooth, flat skin of my left chest before donning my clothes and sneakers. And then I’m off.
But this morning—this morning—began differently.
After pouring my usual glass of water, I headed into the bathroom and peered at myself in the mirror.
My roots are showing, I thought. I need to dye my hair.
Now!
I mixed the dye—a brand of henna from Whole Foods that gives my hair a funny purple tint that I love—in a small plastic cup, then squirted it onto my scalp and spread it over my head. I pulled a plastic bag over my skull and tied it with a little knot on one side to hold it in place.
I must hurry. It’s urgent—urgent!—to get outside and begin running!
I grabbed my shirt and shorts and headed back into the bathroom.
I looked at the breast on the shelf.
No. Too much trouble. It weighs me down. I’m not going to spend precious time on stupid things like that.
I quickly pulled my tight-fitting shirt over the plastic bag on my head. My body was noticeably lopsided without the prosthetic breast, but I didn’t think twice about it.
I need to leave now!
Purple-red dye oozed down my face and neck as I sprinted out of the house and down the street.
Now, as I run along in the morning heat, the dye spreads over my shirt and stains my asymmetrical chest.
The streets are almost empty in our sleepy neighborhood. If any of the few people I do pass are surprised by my strange appearance, I don’t notice. I glide along, absorbed in my own internal world.
After an hour I begin to tire and I am ready to return home. But my neighborhood looks strange. I don’t recognize these streets. I don’t recognize these houses.
I have no idea where I am. So
