The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

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refusing to seek help for lymphedema (swelling) in her arm, then yelling at the therapist and storming out when she finally went for treatment. Thanks to Netgalley, the authors (Barbara Lipska and Elaine McArdle) and the publisher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) for a copy of the book.

Lipska's family arranged for her to go to Brigham's, where the bleeding tumor was excised, and the other tumors were treated with stereotactic radiosurgery - a procedure that focuses high doses of radiation onto individual tumors. Lipska was also given steroids, to reduce the swelling in her brain.

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Faptul că avem aceleași celule nervoase de la începutul până la sfârșitul vieții noastre poate fi unul dintre motivele pentru care ne considerăm pe sine ca fiind ,,noi". Ceea ce totuși se poate schimba sunt conexiunile dintre celule și dintre regiunile țesutului cerebral. Unele legături sunt mai puternice, altele dispar, altele se strică. Dacă o regiune a creierului nu mai funcționează cum trebuie, între celule pot apărea noi conexiuni care să ne ajute să recuperăm, într-o proporție mai mică sau mai mare, funcția alterată. Dar, în acest fel, se schimbă oare esența noastră?"

This is one strong lady used to being in charge and when her brain started acting off, her family really didn't know how to react, and she didn't realize it's happening, so it's a real mess for a while because no one wants to take the reins from her or tell her she's not in charge anymore.I made short work of this one. Was totally absorbed in her story. I find anything to do with the mind fascinating. It can be our best friend or our worst enemy. Yet, so little is known about this miraculous organ, the control center of what makes us who we are. The author is the head of the NIH, studying the brains of those with mental deficits, among them schitzophrenia. She had besten cancer twice, was an avid marathon and triathlon partcipant, when she found out she had a melanoma that had spread to her brain. Despite the many years studying the brains, she didn't recognize her own symptoms, but she was in for the fight of her life.

Dr Barbara K. Lipska is Director of the Human Brain Collection Core at America's National Institute of Mental Health. She is an internationally recognized leader in human postmortem research and animal modeling of schizophrenia. Her primary research interests are in mental illness and human brain development. She conducts gene expression and epigenetic studies in postmortem human brains to investigate mechanisms of brain maturation, the effects of genetic variation on transcription and DNA methylation, and molecular mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses. In addition to the deficits, her personality changed to being moody, bad-tempered and intolerant but given all she went through, how much of that was a product of the tumours altering her brain and how much the treatment and how much the stress and pressure of living through a second bout of cancer (she had previously had breast cancer and her first husband had died of the same type of cancer, melanoma, she had)? Such suffering and myriads of days and weeks and months in offices, hospitals and with dozens of advocates and possible optimal medicine associations and paths.An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley and author Barbara K. Lipska for my honest review. A superb memoir from a highly respected neuroscientist who is uniquely qualified to describe her titanic battle against malignant melanoma of the brain. Barbara Lipska clearly believes in those miracles that can be achieved through medical science, and also has an iron resolve to survive. Both qualities underpin this remarkable account of sanity lost and regained.”

Lipska immediately thought 'brain tumor' - and an MRI confirmed her worst fears. The brain scan revealed three tumors in the scientist's head, one of which was bleeding. It made for a detached read. Her access to medical facilities that most people in the world would never have access to and the way she expected that access was revolting, and she could not believe she had to wait for things. A whole hour in a waiting room! Personalitatea fiecărui om este rezultatul unor interacțiuni complexe între factori nenumărați care influențează funcționarea creierului."This book made very little sense. The author is an intellectual high-achieving scientist in a family of high-achievers, and what's more she's a top athlete too and a fantastic homemaker who despite everything, always cooked a home-made dinner (until she couldn't). She tells us all this repeatedly and it is one of the reasons I didn't warm to her. Is this to contrast her off-the-wall behaviour when she was ill? Many thanks go to Barbara Lipska, Houghton Mifflin, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review. When discussing her first husband’s diagnosis and eventual (1985) death from the very same cancer she would later fight, Lipska mentions that in the Poland of the time, cancer was highly stigmatized. A diagnosis of malignancy was viewed as a sign of weakness and a loss of control over one’s life. No cancer patient discussed his condition with friends, or even with family. One has the sense in reading her memoir that this kind of attitude continued to affect (or, maybe, “infect”) Lipska herself. She states that her typical response to emergencies is to throw herself “into a rational, organized plan, and grasp whatever control” she can. She also writes that (earlier in her life) after breast cancer treatment, she was up and about on the fourth day and that she never failed to cook a meal when undergoing chemotherapy. While receiving treatment for her brain tumours, she remained physically active; she even ran a five-kilometer race a few weeks after her first radiation treatment, placing fourth in her age group. I suppose I should be impressed by this, but I honestly found Lipska’s drive bizarre and even alarming at times. What was even more surprising to me was how her family - Polish scientists who had immigrated to the US 25 years earlier (her personal family story is fascinating without surviving two cancers - she also had breast cancer earlier ) - also failed to be alarmed by her increasing anger and frustration, her forgetting how to cook her favorite meals, and eventually even do simple math - until she had progressed significantly. One interesting side to her impaired frontal-temporal function was a loss of emotion - she didn't seem to care one bit about the fact that she was dying. She recalls feeling pretty happy most days, and completely unconcerned. That's encouraging to me actually.