Life keeps reverting to March 14, 2005 for man with baffling medical mystery
WASHINGTON — The man, called only “WO” by his physicians, woke up on the morning of March 14, 2005, at his military post in Germany. He headed to the gym, where he played a 45-minute round of volleyball, then returned to his office to answer a backlog of emails.
In the afternoon he went to his dentist for a routine root canal treatment. He clambered into the reclining chair, donned a pair of tinted glasses and felt his mouth go numb as the dentist inserted local anesthetic.
Every day since, no matter what the actual date happens to be, WO wakes up thinking it’s the morning of March 14, 2005, believing he is still in Germany and that this is the day of his dentist appointment. His life is something of a Groundhog Day in reverse — while the rest of the world moves on, WO is the only person who isn’t aware of time passing.
Starting from that moment in the dentist’s chair a decade ago, he hasn’t been able to remember almost anything for longer than 90 minutes. Then he forgets it, a switch flips, and he’s back to March 14, 2005, once more.
The case, which WO’s doctors Gerald Burgess and Bhanu Chadalavada dissect in a study published in the journal Neurocase, is indeed a medical mystery.
The patient, a 38- year- old member of the British armed forces, had an unremarkable personal and medical background. He was a happy husband and father of two children, was in good standing at work, his only health complaints were the fairly typical aches of middle age — back pain, hypertension.
There was nothing about WO or the ordinary, hour-long root canal procedure to indicate that something catastrophic was happening. His doctors aren’t even absolutely sure that the operation is what triggered his memory loss.
But the main thing that continues to captivate and confuse doctors most is this single, inexplicable fact: there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with his brain.
WO has been tentatively diagnosed with anterograde amnesia, the loss of ability to form new memories after a traumatic event. Much of what is known about this condition comes from the experiences of Henry Gustave Molaison — known to most of the world as H.M. until his death in 2008 — who underwent a flawed brain operation to treat his epilepsy in 1953 and woke up suddenly unable to learn anything new.
The operation turned out to be, in the words of Molaison’s surgeon William Beecher Scoville, a “tragic mistake.” It stripped Molaison of his hippocampus, the sea horseshaped region of the brain that is effectively the mind’s stenographer, responsible for capturing events and sending them away into long-term storage.
Without it, Molaison had no transcript of his life after age 27. His personality hadn’t changed, or his ability to go about everyday tasks. He was even capable of acquiring new skills. But he had lost the ability to remember episodes and string them into a narrative. He was forever adrift in the present.
What WO now experiences seems similar. Though his doctors describe him as “managing” his daily life, he is completely dependent on an electronic diary that reminds him of what he’s doing and what has happened in the 10 years since his last new memory. Every morning he checks his computer for a list of life events he should be aware of — marriages, deaths, his children’s birthdays. Some of them, like the loss of a beloved pet, continue to surprise him.
Stranger still is WO’s relationship to his condition, which he describes almost as if he is simply repeating what he has been told about himself. He will refer to his notes, then say, “I know I have a memory problem,” or, “I think it’s March 2005, but it’s not,” his doctors report in their study.
But unlike in Molaison’s case, there doesn’t seem to be any structural reason for WO’s illness. Brain scans show his hippocampus is entirely intact. And unlike Molaison, WO doesn’t seem capable of learn- ing procedural skills, which are processed in a different part of the brain. Burgess told the BBC when WO was asked to complete a complex maze he had already navigated three days earlier, he approached the puzzle as if for the first time.
“It was like a deja vu replica of the same errors — he took the same time to relearn the task once more,” Burgess, a psychologist at the University of Leicester, said.
For now, it’s a mystery why a routine root canal seems to have cost WO his ability to record any new memories. “That’s the million-pound question,” Burgess told the BBC. “And I don’t have an answer.”
In the 10 years since that trip to the dentist, as his memories are repeatedly, relentlessly eroded at 90-minute intervals, WO has been able to retain just one new fact: the knowledge of his father’s death.
WO doesn’t recall the moment his father died, nor the bedside vigil that preceded it. But something — his intense emotional connection to his father, or perhaps the fact it was the only thing WO thought of during the 90-minutes after it happened — keeps his awareness of the event alive.
It’s the sole piece of driftwood WO has clung to as the tide washes everything else away.