In June 2015, in the midst of immunotherapy treatment for brain cancer, neuroscientist Barbara Lipska was convinced the takeout pizza she’d recently eaten had been made out of plastic.
“They are poisoning us!” she exclaimed to her husband, Mirek, after reflexively throwing up what she perceived as scraps of plastic bag in the bathroom. “I will never eat at that place again!”
Her spouse tried to calm her down, but she was having none of it. In fact, she began to think he was part of the plot against her.
She didn’t know it at the time, but she was experiencing paranoid delusions similar to those of schizophrenia patients whose post-mortem brains she studies in her job at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.
Now, the 66-year-old grandmother has written about her three-month brush with insanity in her new memoir “The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind” (HMH Books).
Lipska was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain in January 2015. An MRI scan revealed three tumors, including a raisin-sized growth on the part of the cortex that controls sight.
“I moved my right hand to the right of my keyboard, and it just disappeared from my vision,” she recalls, matter-of-factly, of the moment she first noticed something was amiss. “Being a neuroscientist, my first thought was: ‘It must be a brain tumor.’”
She immediately had surgery followed by radiation, and was accepted into a clinical trial for immunotherapy that April. Amazingly, she continued in her role as director of the Human Brain Collection Core at NIMH. The veteran triathlete, who has completed several Ironman races, even kept up with her cycling, swimming and running.
Although the treatment eventually proved to be lifesaving, Lipska’s mental health went awry. Neither she nor her family or colleagues picked up on the symptoms at first. They put them down to stress over her condition.
“My personality started to change, and I would snap at my co-workers and even yell at my grandsons,” says the Polish native who immigrated to America 29 years ago. Small things such as train delays or loud noises were hugely irritating to her.
By early June she was unraveling. Lipska could barely navigate her way home from work in the car, and she fired the family’s trusted pest-control man because she was suspicious that he was a con man. One morning, she went running for two hours midway through dyeing her hair.
“I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror,” she writes in the book about her eventual return to her house in Annandale, Va., after the jog. “My head is caked in sweat mixed with hair color, the plastic bag plastered on top of my head like a weird cap. Streaks of purple dye, long since dried to black, have crusted in thin rivulets down my neck and arms.”
Later that month, Lipska celebrated her last infusion of immunotherapy with the takeout pizza she had been convinced was made from plastic. “My overreaction was a turning point for my family,” says Lipska. “They were desperately worried.”
Her daughter, Kasia, 42, an endocrinologist in New Haven, Conn., insisted she go straight to the ER. There, an MRI found 18 new tumors in her brain. Her frontal cortex — the area linked to cases of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and dementia — was acutely swollen.
“The similarity between my experience and that of people with a wide range of mental illnesses … is remarkable,” she writes. “I gained a deep understanding of what it is like to live in a world that makes no sense, that’s bewildering and unfamiliar.”
‘I gained a deep understanding of what it is like to live in a world that makes no sense, that’s bewildering and unfamiliar.’
Mercifully, just weeks later, the tumors either disappeared or shrunk due to her cancer doctor’s gamble on a new set of experimental immunotherapy drugs. The swelling subsided with the help of steroid treatment. Lipska beat all the odds to survive. Her sanity slowly returned.
“Most patients [with cases that severe] die because of their tumors and, if they are mentally ill, it can be continual,” she tells The Post. “I’m in a unique position because my memories are intact.”
Now cancer-free, Lipska considers her recovery “a miracle.” However she lives in fear that the tumors will come back and madness might fall on her again. In January, another small tumor was found on her brain that was successfully treated with radiation.
“I think I owe [my situation] to luck, the skill of my doctors and the love of my family,” she says. “Without love, I would be dead by now.”