Dazed and confused

Last year I had a lost time incident. My first coherent memory of the day was being in hospital after having a CT scan. My wife had left to see a friend at 11am and I was going to do some work in the garden. She returned at 1.30pm to find me, to quote Led Zepplin, “dazed and confused”. I told her I thought I’d blacked out and there was evidence that I had started to make a coffee but not finished the job. Physically I was functioning quite normally, but mental function was a different matter. She realised there was something seriously wrong when I saw clothes laid out in a bedroom and asked “Are we going on holiday?”

Questioning revealed that I had no memory of anything since about 2013. I immediately forgot the answer to any question I had asked and kept repeating the question like a broken record. In the ambulance I kept asking: “You’ll have to tell me why I’m here and I don’t mean that as a philosophical question” – which sounds rather fortean. When hospital staff attending to me went away and then returned to the cubicle I said things like “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” Assorted tests (blood, urine, X-ray, CT scan, etc) gave normal results. Then at about 5.30pm my memory began to return, but apart from what others have told me, what happened that morning remains a blank. The final diagnosis was something called TGA (Total Global Amnesia), which is apparently not that uncommon and, thankfully, has no specific future implications. However, I do wonder if other lost time incidents might have a similar cause. Ron Gardner Ludlow, Shropshire