A 56-year-old resident of Louisiana, USA, was admitted to the hospital due to severe headaches. When she regained consciousness, she insisted that it was the year 1980, and she was a young girl.
This incident occurred five years ago, but it only recently came to light in the media when the victim shared her story with journalists.
Kim Denicola lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is now 60 years old and has grandchildren, but she still suffers from a strange spontaneous amnesia that wiped out thirty years of her life.
In October 2018, she was attending a Bible study group meeting as usual when she began to experience severe headaches and her vision became blurry.
She lost consciousness, and when she woke up in the hospital, she believed herself to be a young unmarried girl and remembered nothing about her husband and two children. She also didn’t know about the existence of computers and thought that the current US president was the same as in 1980.
“Do you know what year it is?” the nurse asked her.
“Yes. 1980,” Denicola replied.
“And who is our president?”
“Ronald Reagan.”
When Denicola was told that it was actually the year 2018, it was a big shock for her.
“Televisions are so smart now, but the TV I remember was a big box standing against the wall. To change the channel, we had to get up and walk to it,” Denicola recalls.
Doctors diagnosed the woman with extensive amnesia, but they still do not understand what caused it and why she suddenly lost her memory of thirty years. Even after conducting numerous tests and scans.
When Denicola saw her husband and children, and when she arrived at her home, everything seemed new to her, as if seen for the first time. Before that Christmas, she prepared a lot of goodies, saying that she had “missed so many Christmas holidays” and wanted to make up for it.
Doctors now believe that she will probably never be able to recover her memories.
Her diagnosis is officially termed as Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) with acute onset, and in the US, approximately 5-10 people per 10,000 suffer from similar conditions each year. However, cases as severe as Denicola’s are quite rare.
Women over 50 are considered to be at risk. It is believed that such amnesia can occur due to particularly stressful work or stress, but it can also occur during severe migraines.
In an attempt to regain her memory, Denicola read entries in her journal, but, she said, it felt so alien, as if she were reading about a stranger.
Fortunately, thanks to the care of her family, Denicola has regained warm feelings towards her husband and children. And she remains very optimistic:
“Maybe I lost my memories, but you know what? We can create new ones.”
