“You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.” “She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.

When her father hopped on a video call, April remarked “Oh, you lost your hair,” and burst out laughing, Guy Burrell recalled. She even recognized her niece, whom April had only seen as a small child, now a grown young woman.

But her family said she remembered her childhood home in Baltimore, the grades she got in school, being a bridesmaid in her brother’s wedding - seemingly everything up until when the autoimmune inflammatory processes began affecting her brain. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.”Ī video of the reunion shows that April was still tentative and fragile. “When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. she recalled her childhood home in Baltimore, the grades she got in school, being a bridesmaid in her brother’s wedding - seemingly everything up until when the autoimmune inflammatory processes began affecting her brain.”

The details were hazy, but it appeared that April had suffered a traumatic experience, which The Washington Post isn’t describing to protect her privacy. April was incoherent and had been hospitalized. She just loved life.”īut in 1995, her family received a nightmarish phone call from one of her professors. “April was a high achiever,” said her older half brother, Guy Burrell. She helped her dad renovate his dozens of rental properties and could even wire outlets and climb on roofs to tar and repair them.īy all accounts, she was thriving, in overall good health and showing no signs of mental distress beyond the normal teenage growing pains. She played volleyball in high school, and her family remembers her as being profoundly capable in all things. She was keenly focused on academics and would be disappointed if she received a B in a class. She lived with her father, who had served in the Army, and her stepmother and is one of seven siblings. She balanced her dad’s checkbook and helped collect the rent on his properties. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.”Įven as a teenager growing up in Baltimore, April showed signs of the college accounting student she would later become. “These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.Īnd scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.Īlthough the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated. The awakening of April - and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions - now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions. We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” - Sander Markx

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