"Her brain is on fire."
The title of the book itself is the very first metaphor the reader encounters. The phrase is the shorthand that the doctor who finally provides a correct diagnosis uses to explain the complication condition to the author’s parents. The phrase is a metaphor describing the inflammation of the author’s brain resulting from autoimmune reaction.
The Seizure
The author’s health problems being to take a serious and notable turn one night when her boyfriend wakes up in bed to find her sitting up straight, eyes wide open but seemingly not seeing. This already unnerving scene is almost immediately doubled in intensity when:
“My arms suddenly whipped straight out in front of me, like a mummy, as my eyes rolled back and my body stiffened.”
This mummy-like aspect would eventually become quite significant to the process of finally receiving a proper diagnosis.
“The mind is like a circuit of Christmas tree lights.”
The opening line of the chapter subtitled “Multiple Personality Disorder” presents a metaphor that is dependent upon knowing history. The string of lights which adorn Christmas trees today are different from their origins. At one time, all strings of Christmas lights had one incredibly annoying feature in common: if just one bulb went blew out, the circuit would be broken and maybe some or maybe none of the other lights would work. The metaphor here refers to that particular aspect of Christmas tree lights which may make this reference obscure to younger readers.
The Job
It is while working as a reporter at the New York Post that the author’s brain begins catch fire. Much of the first half of the text uses her workplace as the setting in which to frame how the slowly evolving manifestations of her medical condition transforms her personality. The manifestation of symptoms are essential to the story because they reveal the difficult process of making a proper diagnosis of a truly rare condition when those symptoms mimic a host of far less serious and more common problems. One particular comparison used in a simile is also a chilling sort of foreshadowing on several levels:
“Often, like today, the newsroom is as quiet as a morgue.”
The Elephant in the Head
Dr. Balice-Gordon uses the parable of blind men touching a different part of an elephant in effort to determine what they are holding as a metaphor for neuroscience. The study of the mind—something which cannot be seen—is, she suggests, quite similar in that:
“We’re sort of approaching the elephant from the front end and from the back end in the hopes of touching in the middle. We’re hoping to paint a detailed enough landscape of the elephant.”
