Other mysteries prevail. Experts don’t even know why certain people have this type of autoantibody, or why it happened to strike during that exact time in my life. They can’t say for certain how the antibody gets through the blood-brain barrier, or if it is synthesized in the brain, nor do they understand why some people recover fully while others die or continue to suffer long after the treatment is finished.
But most do survive. And even though it’s a hellish experience, the disease is unique in that way, compared to other forms of deadly encephalitis or debilitating autoimmune diseases. It’s difficult to find another example where a patient can be comatose and near death, even in an intensive care unit, for many months yet eventually emerge relatively, or even fully, unscathed.
One thing this whole experience is slowly teaching me is how lucky I am. Right time, right place. NYU, Dr. Najjar, Dr. Dalmau. Without these places and people, where would I be? And if I had been struck by this disease just three years earlier, before Dr. Dalmau had identified the antibody, where would I be? Just three years marks the demarcation between a full life and a half-existence in an institution or, even worse, an early ending under the cold, hard tombstone.
CHAPTER 44
PARTIAL RETURN
As he tapered off my dose of steroids, Dr. Najjar prescribed biweekly at-home antibody IVIG treatments once the insurance company finally allowed them to be conducted at home. A nurse would arrive midmornings to hook up my IV to the bags of immunoglobulin over three to four hours. Between July and December, I had twelve infusions.
I continued my correspondence with Paul throughout July. Inevitably every few days he would ask about when I was planning to return to work, and eventually we agreed that the best strategy would be for me to casually stop by the Post offices and say hello to the staff without pomp and circumstance. We picked a date in mid-July. I remember the charge I felt as I blow-dried my hair, applied makeup, and plucked my eyebrows, the first time I had done any of that since before I was sick. Then I stood in front of my closet and examined my paltry wardrobe. Only a few things still fit, since I was well ensconced in my “roasted pig” stage, so I chose my trusty black tent dress. My brother drove me to the station, and I took my first independent train ride into the city. From Penn Station I walked uptown to my offices in the scorching midsummer weather.
But when I got to the towering News Corp. building, the place where I had worked since I was a teenager, I felt the rush of adrenaline exit my system, leaving me depleted. This is too soon, I realized; I’m not ready.
So I texted Paul instead and asked him to meet me behind the building. I had no idea then, but Paul was nearly as nervous as I was, concerned about how I would be in person and how he should treat this new Susannah. Angela, who had visited me recently in Summit, told him that I was significantly improved but still a far cry from the colleague they were used to.
When Paul walked out of the building’s revolving door, he saw me and immediately noticed how much I had physically changed: I looked like a little cherub, he thought, like a ten-year-old version of myself, complete with baby fat.
“So how the fuck are you?” Paul asked, hugging me.
“I’m good,” I heard myself say. I was so nervous that I could only concentrate on the sweat trickling down my lower back, much like when I ran into Kristy with my mom, but this time I didn’t have the buffer of another person to keep the conversation going. It was doubly difficult for me to even focus enough to look him in the eye, let alone prove to him that I would soon be ready to return to work. He cracked some jokes and talked about the job, but I couldn’t keep up. I noticed myself laughing at inappropriate times but then missing the cues to his punch lines. I could tell he was trying hard to deflect the awkward silences by maintaining a happy-go-lucky facade, but he was struggling. My state was a bigger shock than he had anticipated.
“I’m still on a lot of drugs,” I said offhandedly, hoping to provide an explanation for my changed self. “But by the time I come back, I will be off most of them.”
“That’s great. We have your desk all ready for you to return. Do you want to come up and say hi to everyone? I know people miss you.”
“Nah. I’ll do that another day,” I said, looking down at the ground. “I’m not ready.”
We hugged once more. I watched Paul disappear through the revolving doors.
When he got upstairs, he went straight to Angela’s desk. “That’s not the Susannah I know,” he said.
It was an untenable position. As a friend he was deeply concerned about my recovery and my future, but as a boss, he couldn’t help but wonder if I would ever be capable of returning to my duties as a reporter.
Nevertheless, two weeks after my brief reunion with Paul, Mackenzie called me up about an assignment for Pulse, the paper’s entertainment section. As I heard her voice, though, it reminded me of our last interaction: the night in Summit when I had failed to write the article about Gimp, right around when my seizures began in earnest. Along with that memory came a sickening feeling of failure. The self-disgust transformed into joy, though, when I realized she was offering me a new assignment.
“I want you to write about Facebook etiquette,” she said.
I may not have been ready to see all my old coworkers, but I jumped at the opportunity to write an article. I spent a week manically working on it, treating it like social networking’s version of Watergate, calling up sources, friends, and press people to get their perspectives. But once I put all my notes together in one file, I stared at the blinking cursor and couldn’t picture how to begin. The memory of that failed Gimp article only intensified my writer’s block. Would I ever be able to write again?
After I sat in front of that blank screen for nearly an hour, though, the words started to come, slowly at first and then like a fountain. The writing was rough and needed a lot of editing, but I had put fingers to keyboard, and nothing in the world felt better than that.
My article ran on July 28 in the Post’s Pulse section under the headline “Inviting Rudeness.” I remember making a special trip to town to pick up the paper that day and glowing with pride when I opened it and saw my article there. Sure, I’d had hundreds of pieces published before, but this one mattered more than any other. I wanted to show the article to everyone, from the Starbucks baristas who had served me coffee all summer, to the younger girls who rode beside me in that spin class, to the woman at the wedding who had asked if I would ever regain my spark. This article was my redemption. It shouted to the world: I’m back! That was the most excited I had ever been about a story running in my whole career. I wasn’t going to graduate school; I was going back to work.