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

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Lipska did recover, both from the cancer and the side effects, though she's aware the 'cure' might not last forever. Still, Barbara's at peace, and very grateful to her family - as well as the doctors and other medical professionals who treated her. She says "I'm feeling great, although I am not as powerful as I used to be — both in terms of my physical strengths and emotions. I went through so much. My brain was assaulted with drugs, with radiation. I lost my vision in the left eye.....I lost some balance. I am a little disoriented spatially, so I have sometimes trouble with maps and finding my places. But, you know what? I'm alive — and that's all that counts. And I'm happy!" Lipska is very fortunate to have a husband, Mirek, who's a cool-headed mathematician; a son, Witek, who's a neuroscientist; a daughter, Kasia, who's a physician; and a sister, Maria, who's a physicist and chief of therapy in the radiation oncology department at Boston's 'Brigham and Women's Hospital.' An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley and author Barbara K. Lipska for my honest review.

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! In her book, written with Elaine McArdle, Lipska documents her grueling struggle with one of the most lethal cancers. At the time of her diagnosis with metastatic melanoma, one of the original three tumours was bleeding and required immediate surgery. A bleed in the brain is serious. Blood irritates the tissues, causing them to swell dangerously. Pressure builds within the skull, and a patient can die when the brain “cones”—that is, when it is forced downward and the centres controlling heart rate and respiration are compressed. 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.” And that's not even the worst part. OK, you enter a clinical trial because you believe it will benefit you. Clinical trials are meticulously designed and exclusion criteria exist in part to empower a specific intended analysis. By entering the trial under false circumstances, you are jeopardizing the results and potentially the possibility of this drug getting to market. When you had your brain swelling, that very serious adverse event is thoroughly reported. When reviewed by the FDA, such a serious side effect may cause them to decide not to proceed with further trials of this drug. You are potentially sabotaging the release of this drug, and its potential benefit to many patients, by falsifying your information. Also, just considering local consequences, you could have taken the clinical trial spot for someone who could have actually benefitted from it. I mean, I get it, the author was desperate at this point, eager for anything that would help. But, bottom line, it was a very selfish decision.

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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. 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. becoming irrationally furious at Amtrak when her train was delayed, and talking about it for days, to everyone in sight. After successful surgery to remove the raisin-sized cancerous growth that was bleeding, Lipska received targeted radiation to the other tumours. Only after this could such treatments as immunotherapy (which empowers the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells) and “targeted” therapy (aimed at specific molecules within cancer cells) be tried. In spite of an iron will and a high tolerance for pain and discomfort, Lipska confronted tumours that had minds of their own. They kept popping up “like weeds in a garden”. At one point, she had eighteen simultaneously. Many of us might not be able (or even want) to persist in the face of considerable suffering as Lipska did. However, she attributes at least some of her endurance to her long-time training and competing as a marathoner and tri-athlete. Lipska is still not out of the woods; however, the mostly new treatments she underwent have prolonged a life that she obviously values, even if that life continues to pose challenges. Barbara Lipska was born, raised, and educated in Poland before she immigrated to the United States in 1989 to do post-doctoral studies at Maryland's 'National Institute of Mental Health' (NIMH). In 2013 Lipska became 'Director of the Human Brain Collection Core' at NIMH, which secures post-mortem brains for research about the brain and behavior.

First, I think the book would have been much better with more collateral information from others (family, physicians, physical therapists she interacted with) about all these different episodes during which the author was acting bizarre. It was hard to trust the author as the narrator of these stories because she's, well, literally brain-damaged. A spellbinding investigation into the mysteries of the human brain, led by a scientist whose tenacity is as remarkable as her story.” Many thanks go to Barbara Lipska, Houghton Mifflin, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for my unbiased review. 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?" refusing to seek help for lymphedema (swelling) in her arm, then yelling at the therapist and storming out when she finally went for treatment.I am a neuroscientist. For my entire career, I have studied mental illness. My specialty is schizophrenia. In June 2015, without warning, my own mind took a strange and frightening turn. As a result of metastatic melanoma in my brain, I began a descent into mental illness that lasted about two months."—Barbara K. Lipska Primul soț al autoarei s-a îmbolnăvit de melanom, o formă de cancer care avea o rată de supraviețuire de doar câteva luni (la acea vreme). La scurt timp, căsnicia celor doi s-a răcit. De ce? Păi, cică omul trăia în negare, adică nu îi venea să creadă că va muri și s-a închis în el. Probabil trebuia să îi ducă flori, când venea de la chimioterapie. Așa că autoarea l-a înșelat. Nici măcar nu a avut decența de a se despărți de el înainte să se culce cu altul. Peste ani, s-a îmbolnăvit și ea de aceeași formă de cancer. Atât de scârbită am fost de atitudinea ei, încât i-am numit boala ,,karma". Lipska notes that, "Deep inside my brain, a full-scale war had erupted. The tumors that had been radiated were shedding dead cells and creating waste and dead tissue. Throughout my brain, the tissues were inflamed and swollen from the metastasis and the double assault of radiation and immunotherapy. What’s more, I had new tumors—more than a dozen. My blood-brain barrier…..had become disrupted.....and was leaking fluid. The fluids were pooling in my brain, irritating the tissue and causing it to swell." The scientist knew, however, that she wasn't cured, and that new tumors were likely to appear. Lipska decided that her best chance of survival lay with an experimental immunotherapy procedure, which primes the body's immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells. Lipska got into an immunotherapy clinical trial at Georgetown University Hospital, and was periodically infused with powerful antibody drugs over a period of months. I really enjoy books about neuroscience and the brain. I think the book that really turned me on to the subject matter was Brain on Fire. Like that book, I read this one in two sittings, and I'm pretty sure it would have been one had it not been for life getting in the way. I really enjoyed the way Lipska was able to write about how she experienced her "insanity" from the angles of both the patient and the scientist (although I have a quibble about the author's perception of "madness" and feel the title of this book is misleading). I hadn't realized what parts of our brain do what, and the ripple effect irregularities can have on cognitive functions! We are wonderfully made!

A vibrant mental health expert’s bout with brain cancer and the revolutionary treatments that saved her life. AMANDA RIPLEY, New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable

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A very good book written by multiple cancer survivor Barbara Lipska, who is such an accomplished lady. She is the head of the brain bank at NIMH (National Institute of M. H.) in and has studied the brain for over 30 years. Until one day hers seemingly went haywire and she had to go and get treated for melanoma in the brain. While she was being treated for it, it left her acting like she had some of the mental illnesses that she'd been studying all those decades. Barbara Lipska, a Polish-born neuroscientist who serves as director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is a long-time researcher in the field of schizophrenia. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and melanoma in 2011, Lipska had gone on to enjoy good health and a very active lifestyle for several years. Although advised in 2011 that there was a 30% chance of the melanoma recurring, she was confident that she had beaten it. However, in 2015, the then sixty-three-year-old neuroscientist found herself gaining first-hand experience of the kind of cognitive dysfunction and paranoia seen in the people whose disease she'd studied. A number of brain tumours—metastases of the melanoma that had been removed from behind her ear a few years before—were the cause. 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. The initial tumours were in the occipital lobe (responsible for vision) and, as a brain scientist, Lipska knew almost immediately that the loss of sight in the lower right quadrant of her visual field was almost certainly due to the spread of cancer. However, a significant tumour that would later grow in her frontal lobe would greatly affect her cognitive abilities as well as her capacity to regulate her emotions. Other regions of her brain would also be afflicted. Over a period of two months, during the summer of 2015, she “descended into madness”. She also regularly got lost, had trouble orienting her body (and her car) in space, and experienced significant problems with reading and basic arithmetic. După ce am aflat asta, nu mi-a mai păsat deloc de ea, așa că nu am simțit niciun fel de emoție. Ca parteneră a lui de atâția ani, să nu înțelegi de ce reacționează așa?! Ca om, să nu înțelegi ce le face ideea de moarte oamenilor?! În calitate de om de știință, care cercetează creierul de câteva decenii, să nu înțelegi că și tumorile aferente cancerului, implicit tratamentele, pot afecta creierul, determinând schimbări de atitudine? În fine, dezgustătoare purtarea ei. Eu oricum nu sunt impresionată de poveștile oamenilor bogați despre cum au supraviețuit pentru că au fost optimiști. Și săracii ar fi optimiști, dacă ar avea acces la cei mai buni și scumpi medici, dar ei preferă să fie realiști.

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