One of Susannah's major concerns is the fact that she doesn't remember anything but hallucinations from her month in the hospital. To remedy this and to help her piece together what happened, she describes several scenes from hospital monitoring footage. These videos are the only unbiased evidence Susannah has of her time in the hospital (compared to the personal narratives of her friends and family, or doctors' interpretations as expressed in their notes on Susannah's charts). In this way, the videos come to symbolize the only real “truth” and unbiased record of what happened in the hospital. Similarly, the videos allow Susannah a window into the mind of the person she sees in the videos, a person she barely recognizes as herself. To this end, the videos are also physical representations of Susannah's split identity.
EEG Video Monitoring Quotes in Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
The raw panic makes me uncomfortable, but the thing that truly unsettles me is the realization that emotions I once felt so profoundly, so viscerally, have now completely vanished. This petrified person is as foreign to me as a stranger, and it's impossible for me to imagine what it must have been like to be her. Without this electronic evidence, I could never have imagined myself capable of such madness and misery.
The girl in the video is a reminder about how fragile our hold on sanity and health is and how much we are at the utter whim of our Brutus bodies, which will inevitably, one day, turn on us for good. I am a prisoner, as we all are. And with that realization comes an aching sense of vulnerability.
EEG Video Monitoring Symbol Timeline in Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
