Holy cow!" I said. "It's an ovarian teratoma. You'd better send her over." It was a snap diagnosis, possibly wrong, but there was no harm in raising on a pair of aces. I had a pretty good idea what the other cards would be: memory deficits, gooseflesh, a high heart rate, and no family history of psychosis. The drooling alone was a tip-off. Time and again, characters with boilerplate descriptions – “Lucinda H is a Latina female in her late teens … with short-cropped and spiky hair” – announce themselves with bizarre symptoms that arrive, often without warning, in the most mundane situations. All up, if you’re interested in the brain in all its mysterious glory you should probably keep this book on your radar. When you no longer have a reason to get out of bed, that’s when you’re going to take a long look at the worth of your life.” Yet this unreliability is itself a window into another reality, the distorted Alice in Wonderland world to which the title refers and in which neurological patients are wont to find themselves tormentingly trapped.

Arwen Cleary had been a professional figure skater as a teenager, had retired from the Ice Capades upon its dissolution in 1995, had then raised three children, gotten divorced, and moved with her two younger children to a ranch house in Leominster, a distant suburb, where she worked part-time at a local health club. Her medical history was unremarkable: once a smoker, she had quit ten years earlier. Her travels had taken her no place more exotic than Bermuda and no more distant than Orlando. Her only hospitalizations to that point had been in maternity wards. She was remarkably fit and in seemingly good cardiovascular health, if judged only by her appearance and vital signs. But shortly after a visit to a chiropractor, she had suffered a vertebral artery dissection, a form of stroke. Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole, by Dr Allan Ropper and BD Burrell, is very much in the latter tradition. Ropper is a distinguished neurologist at Harvard Medical School. He has many fascinating tales to tell, but he doesn’t. Burrell does. Or at least Burrell is the prose man, turning Ropper’s professional stories into tight little homilies of neurological and existential meaning.

A week earlier, Cindy Song, a sophomore at Boston College, had started acting a bit withdrawn. Her roommate was concerned enough to call Cindy's sister. The first phone call was not too worrisome. "Not a big deal," the sister said. "She gets that way. Just give her time. She'll be okay." The next call could not be taken so lightly. The patients are holding out their troubles. They are not really asking you to take them. You should only take them if you want or need to take them. Otherwise, leave it. They’ll get along without your suffering. You have another job to do.” At East Shore Hospital an MRI showed an ambiguous blotch on the left frontal lobe of Vincent's brain, and at the suggestion of one of his sons, a pediatrician, the family requested a transfer to us. He arrived sometime around 10:00 that morning and was brought up to the ward. All went well for two years, until she returned to the hospital with sudden right facial drooping and difficulty finding words, sure signs of another stroke, but this time a stroke of a very different kind. A portion of one of the language centers of her brain had been deprived of its blood supply. Her speech was now noticeably impaired. Within a few days, she showed signs of improvement, and was again discharged on a blood thinner.

What are you watching?" Hannah asked Vincent, in an inflection she would later inform me was Kansan rather than Missourian. While Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the source of the title, the theme of implausible reality in neurologic practice comes from the White Queen of Through the Looking-Glass. Neurology is queen of the medical specialties, says Ropper. Like Wells, a queen among Gothic cathedrals, she is neither the biggest nor necessarily the best but few exceed her for finesse and elegance. By the time Vincent Talma and Cindy Song had settled in at the Brigham, Arwen Cleary had been there for four days. She came by ambulance on the morning of July 1, and was admitted to neurological intensive care from the Emergency Department later that evening. Of the three cases, hers was the least clear-cut, the most troubling, and one that had the potential to become an absolute shambles. According to her medical records, her problems had begun two years earlier, when she showed up at a central Massachusetts hospital with disabling nausea, difficulty walking, and vomiting.

Open Library

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: A Renowned Neurologist Explains the Mystery and Drama of Brain Disease

I’m not sure that those statistics are entirely up to date, but in any case this is not a book for hypochondriacs or anyone who worries that their difficulty in remembering film stars’ names might stem from something more troubling than unmemorable film stars. Because the fear it plays on, consciously or not, is the sudden and cruel inversion of normality. Submissions must be < 200 words with < 5 references. Reference 1 must be the article on which you are commenting. PDF / EPUB File Name: Reaching_Down_the_Rabbit_Hole_-_Allan_Ropper.pdf, Reaching_Down_the_Rabbit_Hole_-_Allan_Ropper.epubIn a sense, the book is long argument for the primacy of old-fashioned observation over newfangled technology. The central paradox with which it grapples is that in neurology the very means a patient uses to explain himself – ie his brain – is often impaired, and so unreliable. But those friends that were able to look into the ugly face of ALS and not turn away came to realize that the essence of George had survived this calamity, and for that they have been blessed with the ongoing gift of his love, his humor, his friendship, and an inspiration for life that comes from being around him.” I liked Dr Ropper, he came across nicely and informally, but his ego can get a bit wearisome after a while. I am trying not to hold the whole ego thing against him, after all he is a neurologist and fair enough he does an amazing job that very few people can or would choose to do. Dr. Allan H. Ropper and Brian David Burrell comprehensively explain, through the lived experiences of a number of patients, the complex and sometimes utterly bizarre nature of the brain and the things that can go wrong with it.