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She’s got the pedal to the metal, which is okay because somehow, in the middle of the day, there is not one other car on the highway. And the sky is all fake colors, a kind of bruised green roiling over squeeze-cheese orange. My wife is saying something: Stop apologizing. But she doesn’t mean “No need to apologize.” She is very, very tense. She wants me to shut the hell up. In the flash, I am aware that my thoughts, the part of me that feels like me, can’t claw to the surface. It is scary—like being buried alive. This is not, it turns out, a dream. This is a story about what happened to me on the day that Hurricane Irene— the one that lulled everybody into a false sense of security before Sandy— bore down on us in New York City. It’s a challenging story to write, because the events of that day remain a blank to me even now: Nearly 24 hours of my life went missing, skipped away on French leave. It was like one of those old amnesia movies where the hero wakes up with a headful of mirrorshard visions: Wha...Where am I? Except that I hadn’t been conked in the head. And in this story I’m no kind of hero. My mind snapped back into place in a ward bed at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in the predawn hours of the following morning, rain spattering the window beside me. Five yards away, our beds arranged toe-to-toe, I faced a sweating man handcuffed to his bed rail. The cop seated beside him nodded to me; then they both turned back to a sitcom on the overhead TV. A neurology researcher would later tell me, “I know of only one place where this sort of thing is actually common, and that’s on soap operas.” That sounds about right, until your life starts imitating daytime TV. As it turns out, this plot twist isn’t receiving its due. I had been ambushed by a particular form of amnesia that day— doctors call it “transient global amnesia,” or TGA—and it might be more common than most people, maybe even many doctors, realize. In one Swiss study, titled “Transient Global Amnesia—Not So Rare After All,” researchers determined that the condition strikes about seven in 100,000 people every year, and that 30 percent of the cases reviewed were initially misdiagnosed. So not runof-the-mill, but not exactly hitting the mental Mega Millions either. And that’s for the whole population. Research shows that the number of occurrences actually jumps in the over-50 age group, with accounts ranging from 24 to 32 cases out of 100,000 people annually. That would put me, at age 54, in the TGA sweet spot. In seeking possible causes of my own attack, I read vivid personal accounts of TGA victims who snapped out of it miles from home, lost, or who came around bruised and scraped, perhaps from fights they didn’t remember getting into. In my own case, I just floated out of the fog and found myself in a strange bed with EKG terminals taped under my shirt, an Ace bandage holding a pulse monitor in place, and an IV dripping magnesium. (Apparently I was slightly low. “That was all they could find,” a nurse would explain, almost apologetically.) Big wads of gauze were taped to the back of each hand. I saw that I’d cut and bruised my ankle somewhere along the line. It was still bleeding some, but it didn’t hold my interest. My full attention focused on my so-called brain.
THERE WAS A CLIPBOARD NEXT TO ME, WITH A NOTE IN
my wife Claire’s familiar handwriting: —This is not a STROKE. —Claire brought you to New York–Presbyterian Hospital in the car. She is OK!!!! —You are having memory loss. Don’t have a reason. —This is TEMPORARY. Claire had spelled it out in huge letters. Possibly, I thought at the time, because they were written in haste or anxiety. I now realize it was something else: a subconscious shout, an attempt to make something register with me and stick. TGA, I later learned, has the quality of being both retrograde, meaning that the amnesia blots out older memories, and anterograde, meaning that you can’t hold on to new information after the amnesia’s onset. I had about a one-minute window of recall. Then: Reset to zero. I also now understand that the note’s bullet points (there were many more) were direct answers to questions I couldn’t let go of—How did I get here? Are you all right? I’d asked them over and over. The bizarre, relentless repetition of questions is a common theme in TGA reports; in one study’s description, it’s as if “a fragment of a soundtrack is being repeatedly rerun.” It would be almost comical if it didn’t fray the nerves of everyone around the victim, who of course can’t remember a thing about it. (I spoke to one man who’d reached the point of exasperation when his longtime life partner kept saying, “Remind me how we met?”) In the days after my attack subsided, I still had a few new relentless questions: Was I sick? What caused this? Will I blank out again? What the hell just happened to me? In search of my balking brain, I read up on the surprisingly rich (if murky) literature on TGA, spoke to neurologists and fellow patients, and tried to affix that evidence to my own case. There hasn’t been enough to convict. That in itself is a scary detail. The last thing I actually remember doing on that pre-hurricane morning was fitting a patio-furniture cover over the basement coal grate in our Brooklyn backyard. Through my earphones, Van Morrison sang, “Say goodbye to Madame George.” About noon, I was later told, I showered and dressed and then wandered down to find my wife, small children, and dog glued to the TV weather report. I hovered in the background for a beat or two. “There’s a storm?” I asked. My family is accustomed to my annoying jokes, but a chill gradually crept over them. “You were taking care of everything all morning,” my wife would later say. “Suddenly it was like a stranger had taken your place.” (As usual, there is a country song that covers this situation.) The scene evolves. Me, stalking out to the backyard and back inside: “I want to know who stacked up all our outdoor furniture!” Family: “You did. For the storm.” Me: “What storm?” Repeat four times. I had stepped out of the shower and fallen off a cliff. But why?
T
“AMBUSH AMNESIA” MAY BE MORE COMMON THAN M O S T P E O P L E, E V E N M A N Y D O C T O R S, R E A L I Z E .
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