By most indications Emily Gavigan had lost her mind.
It all started one night in January 2009, after the then-20-year-old had met friends for coffee. Driving home, she became overwhelmed with paranoia, thinking a predator was chasing her. She detoured to her grandfather’s house for protection.
Over the following months, the sophomore at Pennsylvania’s University of Scranton became unable to do simple math or say certain words. Gavigan wound up in a psychiatric hospital that she, in her new state, thought was a stage set.
Physicians treated her with a cocktail of antidepressants and mood stabilizers. “The medication turned me into a zombie,” Emily, now 28, told The Post.
Eventually, she suffered a grand mal seizure that lasted nearly an hour.
“Things got bad enough that a priest was called in,” said her father, Bill Gavigan. “Three or four times, we were told to come to the hospital because there was a fear that she would not make it through the night.”
As explained in Sunday’s episode of the HLN docuseries “Something’s Killing Me: Into Madness,” Emily was plagued with a life-threatening malady — but she was eventually saved thanks to a story that first ran in The Post.
“My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness,” published in October 2009, detailed the mysterious mental and physical deterioration of Post staff writer Susannah Cahalan. Her own life was saved by Dr. Souhel Najjar, who diagnosed her as suffering from a little-known autoimmune disease called anti-NMDAR encephalitis, in which the immune system attacks the brain.
Within six months of the diagnosis, Cahalan was back in The Post’s newsroom and writing about her ordeal, which later became a book and movie, both titled “Brain on Fire.”
Following the story’s publication, eight months after Emily Gavigan’s symptoms first presented, Cahalan went on the “Today” show to discuss her ordeal.
“My sister saw it,” remembered Bill. “She called me. I looked it up online and got excited. I sent the information to [Emily’s] doctor.”
But the family’s hopes for an answer were quickly dashed by the physician. “He asked Emily to leave the room and said to my wife and I, ‘You two need to come to grips with the fact that you have a daughter with a mental illness. [Anti-NMDAR encephalitis] is not what Emily has.’ ”
Over the next six months, Emily was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Finally, in April 2010, after she seemed to forget how to walk, she was examined by Dr. Mitchell Gross. The neurologist recognized that Emily showed too many white blood cells to have MS. Bill took the doctor aside and handed him Cahalan’s story. The doctor read it and agreed to test Emily for the disease.
Two hours later, she was airlifted to the University of Pennsylvania, the home facility for Dr. Josep Dalmau, who discovered the antibody-producing autoimmune disease in 2007. Under his care, Emily showed dramatic improvement within months
“Without Susannah, I could have ended up in another hospital, where this would have gone untreated,” she said. “I could have died.”
She ranks among the lucky ones. It’s all too easy for autoimmune encephalitis to fall through the cracks of testing. Najjar says in the documentary that before Dalmau’s discovery, “patients [with autoimmune encephalitis] were locked in psychiatric wards. Many of them died from unexplained diseases, often mistaken as psychosis or schizophrenia.”
Cahalan was the 217th person to be diagnosed with the disease; now, there are many thousands all told. Says Najjar, “You can diagnose it with a simple blood test.”
Raised awareness contributed to Madison Jensen, just 6 years old at the time, being diagnosed two months after she was hospitalized in 2012. Her mother, Mandy, said that the Omaha, Neb., child suddenly began having incontinence problems and nearly drowned in a swim class.
Thanks in large part to Cahalan going public with her disease, “doctors recognized it as a medical problem.” Now 11, Madison is healthy and, her mom said, the disease “doesn’t even cross my mind a lot of days.”
Meanwhile, Emily has gained confidence by surviving the illness.
“I know how strong I am,” she said. “I know that I can get through anything.”