“I don’t know where I am,” I said. “I don’t recognize this place.”
“Well, you did get here. Where’s your car? Did you drive?”
“I don’t know how I got here.” And since I also didn’t know where I came from or where I lived, it was not going to be easy to get home.
My short-term memory had totally, inexplicably vanished
I had just told the story of my long-ago (1956, to be precise) back-alley abortion at a fundraising event for nonprofit TEACH (Teaching Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare) in a San Francisco theater. One five-minute speaker followed me, and the program ended. When we got up to leave – I was on the second row next to my young friend Alexa and her visiting aunt and uncle – I didn’t know how to get to the lobby. Since I had met with other speakers onstage before the event and had led my guests to our seats, something was obviously weird. We finally did get to the lobby, where we had met and visited before the event, and the above exchange took place. At that point something weird turned into something frighteningly wrong.
Alexa left her aunt and uncle to find their own way back to their hotel, summoned a cab and gave the driver my address. Later I would have a dim fragment of memory about being in the cab, and another fleeting memory of entering our building, going up to our condo and then seeing my husband.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. “I need to go to the hospital.” He and Alexa had long since come to that conclusion. She had been texting with one of my children on the east coast and on the phone with my husband since the exchange in the theater lobby. Finding my car safely in its garage space, she had already called a cab to get to the emergency room. But after that moment of seeing my husband, the next four or five hours are lost to me forever.
Its official name is Transient Global Amnesia. If you have it, it’s a good idea to be among friends.
Since I come from a long line of stroke victims, that had been the immediate fear. But it only took a few tests in the Kaiser ER to rule out stroke, a few more to rule out other serious afflictions and arrive at the diagnosis of TGA. Sometime around 2 AM my conscious memory swam back to the surface of reality, which was Alexa sitting on the side of my bed. Then, with a little help from some drug they gave me, I fell asleep.
Fewer than one half of one percent of people in the U.S. experience episodes of TGA every year. It is most common in people between ages 56 and 75, with the average age being approximately 62 – unless I’ve now upped that by a decade or so. For the victim, TGA is really no big deal. You don’t remember anything anyway; but there’s no pain, no suffering, no after-effect and no permanent damage. All I do remember is the comforting vision of my lovely friend, who is known as my West Coast Daughter (now additionally Guardian Angel), sitting on the side of my bed. I was visited by numerous concerned physicians and nurses, several of whom said they’d never heard of TGA.
But now we all have! Before sending me home the next day the very cautious Kaiser people did an MRI of my head, and lo, my brain was still there. Actually, it was functioning on remote even while I was malfunctioning. When posing the traditional questions about what year it was (Nope, didn’t know) etc the ER doctors asked if I could say who is the president of the U.S.
“Noooo,” I said, “but I know I don’t like him.”