Something was wrong with Yamini Karanam.
The Ph.D. student had moved from Hyderabad, India, to Indianapolis to study computer science. But her new life in America was amiss. Once a brilliant student, she now had trouble understanding simple articles. Friends and colleagues would say things to her, only for the sentences to get mixed up in her mind.
Because that’s where Karanam’s problem lay: deep within her brain.
She went on holiday last fall but returned even more exhausted than when she left. Karanam slept for two weeks straight, missing school.
“Then came the headaches. Slips and misses at work followed,” she wrote on her blog. “There were doctors. First, a couple of them and then more.” Then came the “revelation”: Doctors spotted what they thought was a cyst on Karanam’s pineal gland, a tiny pea-like structure in the center of the brain that French philosopher René Descartes called the “principal seat of the soul.”
“The fear didn’t sink in yet,” Karanam wrote. “[My] will was undeterred because it was hardly put to test. [My] energy levels were sinking and fatigue started crippling [my] days. … Months and weeks slipped through [my] fingers. There weren’t any diagnostic procedures left to run on [me]. Consultations followed procedures but nobody said anything useful. It was like white noise passed from the doctor to the patient to the support system. Now, they called it a tumor and that’s all 21st-century medicine could do in three months.”
Karanam grew sicker and sicker as the tumor grew larger and larger. Reading was impossible. Soon, walking was, too. Only 26 years old, Karanam could barely eat. Pains ran from her head throughout her body.
“But the men of science found no correlation between her suffering and the images,” she wrote. “[I] thought they would take [my] problems and own them. But they don’t and they didn’t. There was frustration and anger. Most of all, there was self-doubt. When sanity is in question, the best of us lose ourselves to the answer.”
