Sabrina Bahsoon: 'Tube Girl' shares shock health diagnosis.

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For Sabrina Bahsoon, March 19 began like any other day.

The 25-year-old, better known as TikTok's "Tube Girl" for her viral videos dancing and lip-syncing on the London Underground, was filming content with British girl group FLO in London.

But by the time she returned home, something had changed.

"I just started hysterically crying," she recalled in her first TikTok in nearly seven months. "I was screaming, shouting, acting very psychotic."

By the next morning, she had broken up with her boyfriend, who she was living with at the time.

It came out of nowhere. Sabrina had never mentioned wanting to end things. Confused, he left.

Thankfully, her sisters knew something wasn't right.

Watch: Part of Sabrina's medical journey. Story continues below.

"I texted them, 'Oh, I just broke up with my boyfriend,' and they were like, 'We're coming over straight away.' And thank god they did, because I don't know what I would have done if I was alone."

By the time they arrived, her behaviour had become even more erratic. She was posting on TikTok, screaming at the camera. She was crying and trying to hurt herself. Her sisters called an ambulance.

Sabrina spent two days in the emergency department, still screaming and unable to sleep. As her condition deteriorated, her sisters called their parents, who were on holiday, and told them to fly home.

"The emergency room ended up discharging me, and this is where I start to lose my memory."

Once home, things got worse.

She became violent and described, "hitting things, throwing things, trying to hurt my sister, my brother."

When paramedics arrived, they called police.

Officers led Sabrina away in handcuffs.

Back in hospital, staff restrained and sedated her. Then doctors made the call to section her.

"Sectioning means that the government now has full control over you and what you do, and you have to stay under the care of the hospital," Sabrina explained. "At this point, my parents have just arrived. They find out I'm sectioned and I'm moved to a mental hospital."

In the UK, being sectioned means being detained in hospital under the Mental Health Act.

In Australia, it's known as involuntary admission.

"I couldn't speak, eat or sleep".

It was here Sabrina received her first diagnosis — psychosis.

But it would later emerge that psychosis was a symptom, not the cause; the misdiagnosis led to two months of the wrong treatment.

"They were giving me antipsychotic medications, which I was not responding to," she said. "This meant that I lost all my appetite and I was put in a catatonic state. I lost control of my mind, my body. I couldn't speak, eat or sleep. I would hurt myself by jumping off things. I even burnt my hand on a radiator, and I don't remember any of this."

Desperate for answers, her father contacted a neurologist he'd known since childhood.

On that neurologist's advice, he convinced hesitant doctors to test for encephalitis, a serious — and potentially life-threatening — inflammation of brain tissue.

Finally, they had an answer.

The scans found teratomas, a type of tumour, on her ovaries. They were releasing antibodies that were attacking her brain, and she had developed anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. This is a rare autoimmune condition where the body's immune system attacks receptors in the brain.

It's the same illness journalist Susannah Cahalan wrote about in her memoir Brain on Fire, later adapted into a film starring Chloë Grace Moretz.

For Sabrina, this is the part she describes as "tragic."

"They were willing to keep me in there with antipsychotic medications for a really long time. But because I was deteriorating so much, especially my body weight, my parents were like, we have to do something," she said,

"The mental hospital ended up apologising for kind of keeping me there and not running the test sooner… So from March to June, I was in this mental hospital. That's a huge chunk of my life that I will never get back, that I probably won't ever remember."

On June 18, Sabrina underwent a high-risk surgery to remove the teratomas, followed by two rounds of immunotherapy.

She was discharged in July and is trying to readjust.

"This obviously altered my life," she explained. "So many things have happened and I'm just trying to wrap my head around the whole situation after losing so much, like my memory, and going through a breakup and all the trauma that comes with living in a hospital for five months. Now I'm out in the real world and I'm trying to figure out what my new normal is."

Listen to the latest episode of WELL. Story continues below.

She's now back in Malaysia, where she grew up.

"I'm eating a lot of food. The doctors are saying now that I am better off than 90 per cent of people who go through this, which is so lucky, and I'm so lucky to be here."

"I just need everyone to bear with me while I figure out how to, like, live again. I want to get back to my music. I want to get back to my social media and I wanna be this strong, confident girl that everybody knows me for. But of course I have to go on this healing journey first. I'm excited to be alive. I'm excited to have my mind back."

Now, she wants other families to push harder for answers.

"Anyone who has these symptoms and is just diagnosed as psychosis, I encourage you to fight and get the extra scans and do the extra tests. I was in the mental hospital with a lot of other patients who didn't have anyone fighting for them. And I was super lucky to have my parents fighting for me."

Feature Image: Instagram/sabrinabahsoon.

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Madison Scott

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