A Louisiana grandmother who went to the hospital with a headache claimed she cannot remember her memories from the past 30 years, believing she was a teenager in the 1980s when she woke up in a wild extensive amnesia case.
Kim Denicola was 56 years old when she developed an intense headache and blurry vision while at a bible study group in Baton Rogue, La. in Oct. 2018.
When she awoke in the hospital emergency room, Denicola had no recollection that she was married and had two children.
“I’ve lost a lot of Christmases, so it’s a big deal,” Denicola, now 60, told WAFB.
“It’s unbelievable to me as it probably is to other people,” Denicola added. “Never in my wildest dreams did I get up and go to bible study and think I’m going to wake up in the hospital and I’m going to be 60 years old.”
Denicola was unaware that computers existed and that the country’s leaders had changed hands several times when she woke up.
“‘Do you know what today is, what year are you in?” Denicola recalled a nurse asking. “I said, ‘Yeah, 1980.’ And she said, ‘Can you tell me who the president is?’ I said, ‘Yes, Ronald Regan.’ And she stopped.”
“TVs are now smart. The TV I remember was a box that sat against a wall that we had to get up and go change the channel,” she told the outlet two months after her medical scare.
Denicola was diagnosed with extensive amnesia, officially transient global amnesia or TGA, but doctors still can not determine the exact cause even after extensive tests and scans, according to the outlet.
Five years after she suffered the migraine that changed her life, the nearly 60-year-old grandmother has still not recovered memories.
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Doctors are afraid she will never get her memory back.
“They told me, if by now I haven’t gotten it, then I probably won’t,” she told outlet.
TGA is a “temporary, anterograde amnesia with an acute onset” that mostly affects individuals middle-aged and older, according to the National Library of Medicine, with 5.2-10 people of 10,000 suffering annually with the number rising to 23.5-32/100,000 individuals over the age of 50.
It often occurs during periods of “particularly strenuous activity, high-stress events, or coitus, but it can be seen with migraines.”
The memory condition is often a temporary event and can reoccur, but death is very rare.
Denicola has been reading journal entries in a bid to remember her life but says it feels like reading about someone else.
Denicola has rekindled her love for her husband and watched her children grow up through her stories and pictures.
While it seems she lost 30 years of her life, Denicola is still living each year the best she could.
“I may have lost my memories, but guess what? We can make new ones,” she told WAFB.
