This memoir covers an eventful month, followed by a difficult time period in the life of Susannah Cahalan, who, when this happened, was a healthy 24 year old young woman who worked as a reporter for the New York Post newspaper. 

             One day in 2009, she woke up and noticed two red dots on a vein which ran down her arm.  Susannah wasn’t normally a worrier, but she was concerned, thinking that the dots might be the result of bedbugs, but after a search of her apartment, she found no evidence of bedbugs, but nevertheless, she called an exterminator, but he too found no evidence of any bedbugs in her New York apartment.  However, Susannah couldn’t let go of the thought of bedbugs, and demanded that the exterminator fumigate her apartment.

        While still overly concerned by the thought of bedbugs, she experience a white-hot flash similar to what someone suffering from a migraine might have.   This was then followed by flu-like symptoms.  She began to think some sort of pathogen had invaded her body.  

            While her flu symptoms and headache came and went, Susannah noticed that she had begun being overly suspicious of her boyfriend, and even began snooping into his computer to read old emails from his previous girlfriend.   She realized that this was something she would have never done before.  Her headache returned and she began experiencing pins and needles in her arm, which lasted days.

    Susannah’s personality began to change.  She began to obsess about small things, and became paranoid of some people, thinking they were trying to harm her.  Knowing that something wasn’t right, she went to her doctor, who could find nothing, and suspected she was drinking too much, but had her take an MRI, which showed nothing except a small enlargement in a few lymph nodes in her neck.  This made the doctor suggest maybe she had Mono.  Finally having a diagnosis gave Susannah some relief.  

    While dining with her boyfriend before going to a concert.  Susannah became sickened with just the sight of the food she had ordered. At the concert she became dizzy and queasy   It felt like her legs could no longer support her weight.

    Her blood test came back saying she tested negative for Mona.  She began experiencing sleepless nights, and her work at the newspaper began to suffer.  Walking to work in the morning, colorful billboards began to hurt her eyes.  They seemed brighter than she had ever seen them.  She began to cry at everything, thinking her boyfriend didn’t love her, and she was bad at her job.  Her behavior became erratic,  She seemed to be having a some kind of breakdown.

    One night, Susannah’s grunts, low moans, and grinding teeth woke Stephen, her boyfriend.  When he turned over to see what was wrong, he found her sitting up, eyes wide opened, dilated, and unseeing.  Her arms shot out in front of him, and her eyes rolled back, as her body stiffened, and she began gasping for air.  Blood and foam spurted from her mouth through her clenched teeth.  She was having a seizure and the next thing she knew she woke up in the hospital.

    In the hospital more symptoms developed, her usual patience, kindness, and courteousness disappeared, she screamed to get out.  She became very paranoid, blaming people of ridiculous things.  She thought the people she saw on the TV screen were spying on her.  

           Her behavior become more bizarre and abnormal.  Doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.  Was she epileptic, a manic depressive, there was no solid evidence of what might be causing this abrupt change in Susannah’s personality.  She went from one doctor to another, until finally she was seen by a doctor who was exploring auto-immune infections in the brain.

    At one point, he ask her to draw a clock on a piece of paper.  When he saw that she put all of the clock’s numbers on just the right side of the clock she drew, he knew that the right side of her brain was inflamed.  A brain biopsy confirmed she had a rare form of encephalitis and he began to do the slow work that would hopefully bring Susannah back to the personality and life that she once had.

            It was a very long and difficult struggle for Susannah to get her personality back.  Her old friends were shocked at seeing how much she had changed by the encephalitis.   She could barely talk and certainly couldn’t concentrate on anything.   She had lost all of her confidence.   

            When she began researching for this book, she was horrified to see herself in the videos that had been taken of her, in the hospital.   It was like seeing a completely different person.   

           This book, and then a movie based on it, did much to publicize the auto-immune infection and make doctors recognize the symptoms of the extremely rare brain infection.    For me, the book reinforced how a person’s whole personality is dependent on the brain.  

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Showers at Dusk

     We had rain showers off and on all day yesterday.  That is typical Spring weather in the Robson Valley, and certainly welcome, after weeks of no moisture.   The showers continued into the night. 

    When I carried Kona outside for her final pee, the sky was dark, except for an area of light over the Cariboo Mountains.  That light nicely silhouetted  the chaos of clouds and showers falling on the mountains.  

    I have always found it interesting how quickly my feeling toward rain changes.  During those very dry weeks, I was desperately hoping for showe

rs, but after a day of getting them, I was edgy and ready to move on to sunshine and blue skies.

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Life Doesn't Give Up Easily

     Maybe it's because it is Spring, the season of renewal,  but it seems that I have a bit of a theme going here in the blog about new life surprising me.  While, I had some faith that our brutally trimmed willow trees that had topped in February would re-sprout from the top,  I wasn’t 100% sure, but now they have begun sprouting like mad.

    I had the very wrinkled, several-year-old peas that I had planted in desperation, because I couldn’t find the saved planting peas from last year.  Those old peas came up!   Then there was the surprising young plum tree I discovered that had sprouted from the roots of a long dead plum tree.  Life seems determined to persist.

    Yesterday, when I went out to split some of the bucked-up pieces of willow from those topped trees, I was surprised to find that even those sawed-up chunks of wood were throwing out sprouts.  That is something I had seen before with Cottonwood chunks.

    I guess it is these developed survival skills, that keeps lifeforms continuing through the millions of years of evolution.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Two Plum Trees: That Would Something!

    If you plant an apple tree, you will get apples.  If you plant a plum tree, you won’t get any plums, unless you have a second plum tree somewhere in the vicinity.   That has been a problem for us.  

    See the tree on the left,  that was a plum tree we planted probably 35 years ago (I know it doesn’t look it.)   At the time, we also planted a second plum tree, but it died.  That tree didn’t really prosper.  For more than thirty years, it didn’t even put out a bloom, although somehow it managed to stay alive.   Of course those blooms did start to appear, they never developed into plums, because we no longer had a second plum tree.

    In 2012 we bought two plum trees at Costco and planted them in our garden.  After a couple of years we got some plums from them.  In 2018, we had a bumper crop of plums on one of those trees, so many plums that we didn’t know what to do with them all.  Sadly, the other Costco tree then died, so we were down to two trees, the old original one that never flowered, and the bountiful one, that then no longer produced plums, because there was no second flowering plum tree.

    Then a few years later, that second Costco plum tree also died.  I cut it down, as well as the other dead Costco tree.

    Then as luck would have it, after those two Costco plum trees died and were removed, our original plum tree started putting out a few blooms.  More blooms appeared every year, but since there was no other plum tree on the property, those blooms produced no plums.

    Yesterday I made an amazing discovery.  About eight feet away from the stump of that first Costco tree, I noticed some white blooms along the garden fence, where our clematis vine grows.  It seems to be a plum tree that must have come up from the roots of that first dead Costco plum tree.  I assume I hadn’t noticed this straggly tree that had come up because it hadn’t bloomed, and I just thought it was part of the clematis.

    Anyway, miraculously, it looks like we now have a second plum tree in our yard.  I hope that the bees visit both of them, so some of the blooms are pollinated and produce some plums.  I know it might take a couple of years for the straggly plum to really prosper and put out a lot of blooms that will be more attractive to bees.  

    At any rate, at this point I am very happy and hopeful of this surprising development of having the much needed second plum tree.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Remembering Our Forest Fire: May 5, 2023

     The photo above shows what I saw as I pedaled my bicycle home from the library on May 5th, 2023.  When I got to the highway, and saw all of the smoke, I knew I’d better start pedaling faster, and get home as fast as I could.  Our house is located to the left of the photo at the bottom of the slope.

    As soon as I got home, we figured that we would probably have to evacuate, so we immediately started to gather our valuables together.  The photo below shows the scene from our house as we worked to pack up our car and pickup truck.  It wasn’t long before the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) arrived at our door to tell us that we must evacuate; leaving our home behind to whatever fate was in store for it.  

    It was certainly a memorable stressful moment for us, not knowing whether we would have a home, full of all our hard earned possessions, to return to after the forest fire.   We were very fortunate. 

    While the fire continued to burn in our direction, it began to burn angling upslope, sparing the lower sections of the mountain.  Then too, the wind changed directions and the threat in our direction lessened, and there was rain that night.

    Although we suffered no losses, that fire was sure a wake-up call for us.  It led me to start doing a lot of work on the trees and other flammable surroundings close to our house, in an effort to diminish the possibility of fire on our house.  I still have a lot of work to do in that effort, because the threat still exists.  Summer after summer now, enormous forest fires have been burning unchecked through Canada’s massive forest lands.  Summers have now become a scary time for us, living where we do.  

    This 2023 forest fire didn’t even occur during the summer, it happened in early May, so the Fire Season has really lengthened, because of the changing climate.

You can view my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Monkey Bars

         I figure I probably owe a lot of the physical health I have had during my life, to having access to monkey bars in my  childhood.  As a child we would hang right-side up and upside down, twirl, and do chin-ups on the monkey bars that we had in our yard.  Besides the occasional swings that my father hung from trees, monkey bars were the only constructed playground equipment we had access to in our yard.

        I learned feats like “skinning the cat”, hanging upside down by the back of my heels, and other maneuvers that I don’t know the name of.  It made our muscles strong and gave us coordination.  

        When I began teaching in the one-room school in a remote lumber mill camp in BC, there was no playground or playground equipment for my students to play on.  At recess or during the time when they weren’t in school, there really wasn’t much for the kids that lived in camp to do, so in my free time I bummed some lumber and metal pipe from the camp where the school was located, and built a set of monkey bars so that my students could put their muscles to work.  The photo shows the kids in action on the bars.

        Now days such things as monkey bars are probably considered “too dangerous” for kids to play on.  I am thankful that during my youth, we were allowed, and benefited, from a little danger in our play.

        I have a inversion table in my room and still periodically use it to hang upside down.  While my old body is hanging upside down, I often think about all those physical maneuvers we used to do on the monkey bars as a kid.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

An Evening Drive Down Hinkelman Road

     Just about every Saturday evening we drive out Hinkelman Road to visit with friends.  Quite often on that drive, I have to stop to take a photo, which then often shows up on this blog on Sunday morning.  Last night was no exception.  The yellow green Spring foliage is now out on the trees, and it was being nicely illuminated by the low sun, far down the west side of the Valley.

    All winter long, when we made this drive it was totally dark.  The drive is so much more interesting on these stretched-out days of Spring.

take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca