Very moving: Woman overcomes total memory loss to graduate from college.

[dixiegrrrrl]

Wow....what would it be like if you woke up tomorrow, had no memory of your marriage, family and of how to interact in the world, how to do daily activities?

"Going back to school as an adult is scary for anyone. But Meck, a homemaker and former aerobics instructor from Gaithersburg, Maryland, had a very special reason to be apprehensive. She suffered total memory loss at the age of 22 when a ceiling fan fell on her head as she was cooking, leaving her in a coma with a brain full of cracks. When she came to, she remembered nothing about her past, and had the mental capacity of a young child. Meck woke up to a life she didn't remember having, that of a young mother and wife living in Fort Worth, Texas. Family members remember her looking at them with a chilling lack of recognition after the accident.

"It was literally like she had died," her husband Jim told the Washington Post. "Her personality was gone.

"It was Su 2.0. She had rebooted."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110525/ts_yblog_thelookout/after-total-memory-loss-woman-starts-over-graduates-from-college

[Poll_Blind]

1. If it is to be believed, people should definitely read the whole article. Amazing!

And very, very weird.

I would love to watch a documentary on her.

PB

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. We do take our memories for granted.

Oliver Sacks wrote of several amnesia patients, in a way that described how very awful it must be to be ...nobody.

[Poll_Blind]

5. First, Oliver Sacks is awesome. And second, living in the hippie capital of the world, I...

...have had perhaps more than my fair share of psychedelic experiences, either with LSD or mushrooms. I haven't done any of that in a very long time, but while I had many pleasurable and consciousness-expanding experiences, I've also had some bad trips too. And during those handfull of bad experiences, I was basically an amnesiac without memory of who I was, where I was or anything like that. During one especially intense episode I was, for a prolonged period of time, absolutely senseless and I'm forever grateful that I didn't harm myself, unwittingly.

Experiencing something like that even for just a few minutes is bad enough. We're talking hours and hours in this case, and I was alone in my home. I was shaken to the core for weeks. I learned that Hell isn't being harmed or hurt. Hell is being lost. Hell is being lost in a field of tall grass forever. And without a memory to recollect, we are lost in the truest sense I know of.

PB

[patricia92243]

4. I also would like a documentary, book - something with more detail. Even a long interview on one of

the stations would be nice. I know they could probably use the money - lots of doctor, rehab bills.

[KittyWampus]

3. Read the article and it says volumes about her husband for sticking with her.

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Good point. Yes.