A 56-year-old woman from Louisiana, USA, was hospitalized due to severe headaches. When she woke up, she claimed it was 1980 and she was a young girl.
This incident happened five years ago, but it only recently came into the media when the victim told it reporters about her story. 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 has robbed her of the memory of thirty years of her life.
In October 2018, she was attending a Christian Bible study group meeting as usual when she began experiencing severe headaches and blurred vision.
Denicola lost consciousness and when she woke up in the hospital, she considered herself a young, unmarried girl and remembered nothing about her husband and two children.
Kim also did not know about the existence of computers and thought that the President of the United States is the same now as he was in 1980.
“Do you know what year it is?” the nurse asked her.
“Yes. 1980,” Denicola replied.
“Who is our president?”
“Ronald Reagan.”
When Denicola was told that it was actually 2018, it was a big shock to her.
“TVs are so smart these days, and the TV I remember was a big box against the wall. To change the channel we had to get up and walk to it,” Denicola said.
Doctors diagnosed the woman with extensive memory loss, but still don’t understand what caused it and why the woman suddenly lost her three decades of memory.
Even after doing many tests and scans. When Denicola saw her husband and children, and when she arrived at her home, everything was new to her, as if she were seeing it for the first time. For this Christmas she cooked a lot of delicious food and said she had “lost so many Christmases” and wanted to make up for it.
Doctors now believe it is likely she will never regain her memories. Her full diagnosis sounds like temporary anterograde amnesia of acute onset (TGA) and in the US approximately 5-10 out of 10,000 people suffer from this each year.
However, such strong cases as Denicola’s are very rare. Women over 50 years old are at risk. This is believed to be caused by particularly hard work or stress, but it can also occur with severe migraines.
In an attempt to regain her memory, Denicola read the entries in her diary, but she said it was so strange, as if she were reading about a stranger.
Fortunately, thanks to the care of her family, Denicola regained warm feelings for her husband and children. And she is very optimistic: “It is possible that I have lost my memories, but guess what? We can create new ones.”
