In which Marinette Agreste's family and friends are put to the test when she faces an extremely rare disease, told in the point of view of Alya Césaire. Based on the novel and movie, Brain on Fire. (It's not very long and it's formatted weird, but just go with it)
It all began with her birthday, her twenty fourth, to be precise. She hosted a small get-together at her mother and father's home; they baked up a cake and brought over Adrien, Nino and me to celebrate too.
While her parents, Adrien, Nino, and I were huddled closely around her, I starting feeling as if she were in an empty daze, as if she had been unfocused on everything around her.
I simply blamed it on my lack of sleep.
After attaining a job in Gabriel Agreste's fashion company as an apprentice of his, she's been working awfully long hours, but it wasn't necessarily difficult work. I know she was already used to having to create garments of clothing within a limited amount of time, taking care of paperwork in small timestamps, and all that jazz. What she was doing for Mr. Agreste was nothing out of the ordinary, and definitely wasn't overworking, right? It might have been quite the jump from college, but there's nothing she couldn't handle Dupain-Cheng style!
Well, Agreste style now!
Call it quick, but she and Adrien got married a few months ago, after dating since they were fifteen. God knows why they married at such a young age, but they're enjoying themselves nonetheless, so I'll let the dorks slide. Nino and I, however, are still taking it very slow.
Marinette, Adrien and I became roommates after college, and we all live in a fancy apartment downtown, closer to the Agreste headquarters, and La France Locale. I was able to score myself a job as one of the leading reporters for the company, it's a big deal. Adrien decided to test his independence with his father and began working in some experimental dermatology lab. I don't really know much about it, but he's going to make it big in the medical industry, I'm sure.
Marinette snapped back to attention when I gently tapped her back. It was time for her to blow out the candles, but she was nearly unresponsive, as if she were in a lovesick daze for her sweet Adrien, like grade school, except more sorrowful.
She even had trouble blowing out the candles, much to my surprise. Out of breath, perhaps? It's inexplainable, but "maybe she's just under the weather", I thought. After cake and a glass or two of wine, it was time for the party to disperse, so we bade our farewells to the Dupain-Chengs, and head out.
I kissed Nino goodbye and went home with Marinette and Adrien. For the area, the apartment was rather large. Three bedrooms, plenty of kitchen space, and well furnished too. Marinette and Adrien share a room, I have my own - sometimes my boyfriend Nino would stay over - and the last is a spare. Some time last year we ended up renovating it, and it's our ideal place nowadays, like maybe a permanent kind of settlement thing. Nino may even move in later on!
Of course, my natural journalistic tendencies led me to interrogate Marinette, and she insisted she was fine. I kept on thinking it was probably just the common cold. It can't be anything serious considering her pristine and perfect condition. A young woman living the time of her life with her husband and dream job, she's healthy and moderate, nothing could possibly be wrong with her all of a sudden, we all just assumed.
As time went on, I would get news of her being under the weather in work now, but she'd continue insisting she's fine. Gabriel Agreste even sent her home once in concern. He knows when she's not on her A game, so something should be wrong if he sends her home. Call it the father-in-law kind of care, but it's serious nonetheless.
One one of my off days, I was able to sit at home with her and assess her, but she kept saying she was fine, just headaches. Adrien even took a day off from work to be with her too, and she told him the same thing.
It was as if she was beginning to change, little by little. Marinette was always one to know herself the best, and would point out if something were wrong, only to find a solution. Pushing away a clear issue is not characteristic of her at all.
One day, I came home to Adrien telling me how she was hallucinating, almost. She would point to spots on her arm, completely sure they were bed bug bites, but there was nothing. She started freaking out about a drip in the sink too, pointing whenever one apparently dripped. Adrien and I both knew very well that there was nothing there.
A few weeks later, it was my anniversary with Nino, so we went out to the town, and I spent the night at his place - it was closer to the restaurant and club we went to, and we just wanted to crash for the night.
I woke up the next day to a phone call from Marinette's mother, saying my best friend of ten years had seized.
Yes, as in had a seizure over night.
And you would have no idea how fast I ran out of Nino's apartment and to my car to drive the two of us to the hospital. In her room, Tom was holding her hand while sitting in a chair beside the bed, Sabine was next to him, stroking her fingers through Marinette's hair.
Adrien, on the other hand, was a complete emotional mess mess; he was sitting on another chair in the side of the room, eyes bloodshot, face tearstained. My reporter instincts kicked in again, and I sat with him to question him. There had to have been something that led up to that seizure, and the weird behavior too.
He mentioned how in the middle of the night, Marinette was muttering incoherent words and random phrases in the middle of the night, arms stretched out in front of her. He turned to face her and asked what was wrong, and she was unresponsive until her muscles began spazzing and her eyes rolled behind her head.
In a quick rush, he called an ambulance immediately and they took her to a hospital to facilitate her condition and conduct tests. He dialed her parents who arrived shortly after, it was roughly three in the morning.
He said it was truly horrific, he was too petrified to do anything as the love of his life was in such a terrible condition he had never seen before, but there's a reason the vows say "through sickness and in health."
The doctors blamed it on drinking. They belittled Tom and Sabine for raising a child reckless to the point that she would over drink and party too much, so they gave her a basic medication and sent her off.
She returned back to work, once again being sent home by Mr. Agreste for being in an "unsuitable condition," and even telling Adrien to keep a close eye on her.
She was even said to have screamed irrational words in the middle of work, stand on tables, and cry right after. She was recommended to a psychiatric doctor to get checked out for her abnormal behavior.
It had gotten to the point in which her boss knew this wasn't her. Although it was clearly her screaming profanities within a quiet and professional environment, he knew that she would never in her right mind do anything as unfounded as what she had done.
Believe it or not, Gabriel had grown a soft spot for his number one apprentice. Unlike any of his other workers, she would receive vacation days and flexible hours, yet would still refuse to take more than two days off at a time or work under eight hours. He trusted her to make the right decisions with these privileges, but commended her for treating her time and work as if they hadn't existed.
It wasn't soon until he became his favorite, long story short.
Adrien would even come home sometimes saying that he liked Marinette more than he liked him! It wasn't that he and his father had a bad relationship, per se, but they weren't necessarily close until Adrien moved out, and Marinette began working for the Gabriel Brand. Mr. Agreste hadn't known about hers and his son's relationship until after the job, credible to Adrien trying to avoid any sort of bias - whether positive or negative - when it came to her being hired.
After relaying through the information based on how Gabriel thought about his daughter in law and her relationship with his son, it wouldn't be so surprising after all if he gave her the time of day, contrary to other employees.
But she wasn't an employee, she was a friend, a wife, a daughter.
Marinette insisted she had bipolar disorder, and Adrien and I knew there was something much deeper than this to it. She even took the time to drive herself to a psychiatrist to claim she had said disorder, and received medications for those too.
That afternoon, I had seen her seize for the first time with my own eyes, and Adrien was there as well. We were all cooking up some dinner, Marinette was tending to the steak on the skillet until she fell backwards and shook. Every muscle in her body seemed to jerk, her face made unreadable expressions of what looked like pain and emptiness. Adrien turned off the stoves and lifted her up, ordering me to get the car started as he tried calming her spastic state.
Same responses in the hospital as last time. Too much partying, too much drinking, not enough responsibility. Stress with the transition between college, marriage, and working at an early age. Too many hours a day at work, too much on her plate that she can't handle. The doctors were undoubtedly making excuses for phenomenons they can't explain.
They did every scan possible, she visited the hospital every day, they blamed it on the same things constantly, and wouldn't give us normal answers. She stayed tucked in that same hospital bed for almost a week until she had another seizure.
So many brain tests and monitoring, it drove us all insane that nothing was getting done, nothing was getting better, our girl was losing herself day by day to some kind of illness the world was unaware about! What kind of person goes from pristine healthiness to mentally unstable within a week? It doesn't add up, it makes no sense.
Adrien began taking a day every week off to see Marinette and check on her, spending night after night falling asleep with his head on her chest, holding her hands as he was seated on a pulled up chair.
Marinette once even tried sneaking out during the day, screaming as she tried escaping the facilities, once even trying to convince the doctors that she was perfectly fine, but needed to leave the place since everyone thought she was insane.
This wasn't my Marinette, this wasn't our Marinette.
And so she came back home a few days after, went to a dinner with Tom and Sabine within their own apartment. It started great, but ended with Marinette throwing pots and pans at her parents, then running to a corner and shooing them off, using a knocked down coffee table as a shield from the rest of them until she fell asleep idle on that very spot.
The next morning, she drove back to her psychiatrist, as if it were a routine, this time claiming to have Multiple Personality Disorder, blaming it on her rash behavior for the few days, her screaming and crying and victory and deceit. They took her back into the hospital to do more testing, she seized again, she did scans, it was horrible that they did the same thing over and over again with no different outcomes.
They brought Tom, Sabine, Adrien and me into a separate room to speak, recommending a different hospital that would accommodate to her special mental needs before she broke into more mania. The four of us all refused, still strong on our belief that this was something more serious than mental instability, and that her sanity and life was on the line.
Each and every day, the same excuses and lies came from the doctors, and Marinette became more and more insane, one day she was even talking to someone in the room who seized to really exist. It was all in her mind, and the doctors blamed it on schizophrenia. Once, she even got in a fight against Adrien when she yelled at him for saying bad things to her face, when he really didn't say anything at all.
She was in such a bad state that they were forced to tranquilize her before she'd strike her husband.
The next day, the doctors declared her "catatonic," otherwise in a state of an immobilized stupor. That's when the doctors finally knew something was up.
Her brain activity? Normal.
Her blood? Normal.
Her physical health? Normal.
So what was it? Why was she suddenly in a daze, not even looking at me when I walk in? Not acknowledging anyone? For heavens sake, it was paralysis for what felt like centuries.
Then, a guardian angel seemed to have been looking upon us, when the greatest blessing of our lives came walking through the door of the room, just a day after the declaration. It was her psychiatrist she had been visiting, going by the name of Alix Kubdel.
Dr. Kubdel was following this case, researching endlessly on the possible ties of this abnormal combination of symptoms to one facilitated disease, but there was nothing. Although she did not have any breakthrough herself, she was able to convince doctors to keep her well inside this hospital, and not some psych ward, until someone who could solve this mystery could visit.
Every day for two weeks, Dr. Max Kanté would pay us a visit, doing exercises with Marinette to get her to walk a step or two, to move her arms and toes, to draw something on a sheet of paper. It was on one of the last days that Marinette drew a clock; all of the numbers were up against the right edge of it, not normally spaced around the three hundred and sixty degrees of a normal circle for a clock.
That's when he knew. "Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis," he told everyone.
The right side of her brain was inflamed due to an extremely rare auto-immune disease; her cells were practically attacking her brain, causing the right hemisphere - the side that regulates the left half of her body - to swell, hence the lopsided clock.
He did it, he solved the mystery.
He was able to safely take a sample of her brain for testing, and the disease proved positive - so treatment began immediately. As drastic as her symptoms were, this was actually only the beginning stage of the encephalitis, and was treated with no complications.
A month later, we had our sweet Marinette back, to hold in our arms, to comfort, and to cherish.
Six more months later, she was able to return right back to work, as if she never left, and as if she had never faced an uncommon and fatal disease months before. She had to relearn how to speak, to walk, to sew, and to draw, but she was a fighter, working through each and every process necessary to become herself again. For a bit more time, she did need to use a cane to walk, but she would take that any day over being stuck in a hospital bed.
And thanks to Dr. Max Kanté, several more cases of the encephalitis were diagnosed and cured. No longer were they ruled as "mania," or "over partying," or some type of "schizoaffective disorder."
Her brain was simply fighting against itself, it was simply on fire, and we were able to put it out.
Alya Césaire, La France Locale
Sat 30 Juin