“Ms. B, a twenty-nine-year-old grad student hospitalized for an acute viral encephalitis ( a viral inflammation of the brain) complained : "Nothing feels real. I am dead. " The patient refused any medical care . "There is no point in treating a dead person, " she insisted. Her internist tried to reason with her. He asked her t o put her hand on her chest and feel her heart beating. She did, and agreed that her heart was beating. He suggested that the presence of a pulse must mean that she was not dead. The patient countered that, since she was dead, her beating heart could not be evidence for being alive. She said she recognized that there was a logical inconsistency between being dead and being able to feel her beating heart, but that being dead felt more "real" than any contrary evidence that she was alive.
Weeks later, Ms. B began to recover ; eventually she no longer believed that she was dead. She was able to make a distinction between her recovered "reality" and her prior delusions, yet she continued to believe that it must be possible to feel one's heart beat after death. After all, it had happened to her. “
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