A day in the life: Dasha Ross’s world was turned upside down when her memory vanished
One Sunday in March last year, Dasha Ross’s memory left her. Suddenly struck by a mysterious condition, Transient Global Amnesia, she lost a whole day of her life, and it has taken a year to truly recover.
I’m back at last … back to how I was before I lost my mind. Sitting in the tranquil Daintree Rainforest in Far North Queensland, I roll a ball of black sapote ice-cream around my mouth, feeling all the terrible anxiety I’ve carried for the last year melt away – just like this delicious rainforest fruit ice-cream melts in my mouth. Travelling alone up to Cape Tribulation, Kulki country, to the most beautiful place on Earth – the northern tip of Australia – has been my ultimate test.
It’s been quite a journey because, you see, on Sunday, March 1, 2020, I lost my mind. Not just for a minute, but for an entire day. Gone. I have no memory at all of what took place – and I never will. What happened, and why, remains a total mystery to me. I only know what those people close to me told me about what happened. I’ve only got second-hand memories of the day when my brain froze.
What is memory exactly? I’d never asked this question until I lost mine. One minute mine was there, just as it always had been, like a well-worn, much-loved suitcase at the back of the cupboard. It was reliable (well, mostly) and it could always be dialled up at will. But in an instant, my memory was gone. I had no recall of anything I’d been doing on that Sunday. None.
Consternation set in. Not just mine. I phoned some friends four times in 10 minutes to check on a dinner date that evening, saying, “I’m a bit confused. Am I coming to dinner tonight?” “Yes,” they said. After my fourth call, they rang my daughter, Lola. “We’re worried about Dasha,” they said.
By the time Lola reached my house, I was agitated and disorientated. Earlier that day, a friend had given me a book.
“What book?” I’d asked him just minutes later. Now he returned, concerned that my confusion was the sign of a stroke. He met my daughter at the door and I introduced them five times over. They called an ambulance.
I was dressed for dinner, wearing my brand-new, pointytoed, red suede slingback shoes. Lola suggested I change them for some sensible Birkenstock sandals. “No, no, no, I’m wearing these!” I insisted as I clattered down two flights of stairs, with the slingbacks slipping off, to the waiting ambulance, which I’d now forgotten was coming. I was irritated and confused when I saw it, despite the fact it was festooned in gaudy rainbow pompoms to celebrate Sydney’s Mardi Gras weekend.
I refused to get in the ambulance, repeating, “I don’t want to go through this again. I don’t want to go through this again.”
Maybe I was remembering the last ride I’d had in an ambulance, five years earlier, when my husband went to hospital terminally ill with cancer. He never came home, dying several days later.
Or perhaps I remembered that I’d been taken by ambulance to the Prince of Wales Hospital to undergo a carotid endarterectomy after suffering three transient ischemic attacks (mini strokes) 15 years earlier. Either way, I knew hospital was the last place I wanted to be.
Lola and the paramedics, who thought I was having a stroke, lured me gently on board. They gave me aspirin as I complained of a headache, and delivered me to the Prince of Wales Hospital Emergency Department around 6pm. Lola rode with me in the ambulance, repeatedly answering my questions: “Where am I? Where are we going? What’s happening?”
I remember nothing of these events. I still don’t recall being in the ambulance, nor arriving at the hospital. But bizarrely, I see this all happening now in my mind as if they are my memories, because of what I’ve been told. Once I was in Emergency, the tests started: blood tests, a CT scan, an EEG, balance tests, urine tests, speech tests – any test possible to rule out a stroke. Much later that night, after the CT scan revealed no stroke activity, the on-call head nurse said to Lola, “I think your mother has had a TGA episode.” “A what?” she asked. “A Transient Global Amnesia episode.” It’s a neurological enigma that occurs predominantly in people in the 55-70 age bracket. I’m 60-something and counting. Neurologists say there is no one definitive cause of TGA. Just as mysteriously as it comes, it subsides after four to 12 hours. The memory returns, bringing fatigue, headaches, anxiety and a fuzzy brain.
I still have no memory of that strange Sunday – until around midnight, when the nurse tried, not once but twice, to do a lumbar puncture to test my spinal fluid for infection in the brain. Despite being given morphine, the pain of the large needle being inserted into my lower spine catapulted me right back into reality with a shuddering thud. It hurt like nothing I can recall and my memory was kickstarted into action.
Lola spent the night in a chair beside me, standing guard like a temple lion. I slept fitfully with the aid of a sedative. Across the ward, a man in prison greens was shadowed by a bored police escort of two, yawning and looking mournful. Mardi Gras rainbow flags fluttered off the ceiling. It all felt surreal.
The next morning, I was moved to the neurology ward for more tests. Lola brought me a toothbrush, my iPad and the book my friend had given me. Then the most remarkable thing happened. I opened the book,
Joni Mitchell’s Morning Glory on the Vine, filled with her exquisite drawings and handwritten song lyrics. And I remembered every one of the drawings. I knew I’d seen them before. Each one was lodged in my memory bank. This is the only memory I have from that day.
Several days later, I asked my friend if we’d looked at the book together that afternoon. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”
I had to confess I didn’t.
After two days in hospital, there was tacit medical agreement that, as the emergency nurse had suggested, it must have been a TGA episode.
But I still didn’t have any real information about this mysterious condition. So, bored and lying in my hospital bed, I hit up Doctor Google.
Transient global amnesia is a sudden, temporary episode of memory loss that can’t be attributed to a more common neurological condition, such as epilepsy or stroke. During an episode of TGA, your recall of recent events simply vanishes, so you can’t remember where you are or how you got there. The exact cause of TGA is unknown. However, some research suggests it might be caused by
"I have no memory at all of what took place - and I never will.''
a lack of blood flow (ischemia) or oxygen flow (hypoxia) to the brain.
Possible culprits include stress, trauma, intense physical exertion, immersion in cold water (none of which I’d experienced that morning) and sexual intercourse. “Hmm, I wonder,” I thought to myself. But it’s a delicate situation … how do you ask an intimate friend: “Darling, did we make love? I just can’t remember.” Memo to self: pursue delicately.
TGA is a rare syndrome. It almost never happens to anyone under 50, and its frequency among people over 50 is estimated to be about 25 in 100,000 people annually. Several studies have reported complete recovery of cognitive function between five days and six months later. Other researchers have noted that memory problems can last longer, although this tends to be in people who have had multiple episodes.
Googling TGA was strangely comforting. I didn’t feel quite so weird, loony or alone now. I felt part of an elite club when I learnt that BBC medical journalist Dr Michael Mosley had experienced TGA after swimming in cold water. Former Australian of the Year Professor Fiona Stanley and author Helen Garner have both had TGA episodes, as has Jeff Probst, host of US reality TV series Survivor.
At least I was in good company! They had all lost their minds for a number of hours and had no recall of what took place. Although, each person did know who they were and recognised their family – just as I had.
Weighing heaviest on my mind was: Am I going to make a full recovery? Will there be ongoing brain damage?
On day three of my captivity, the professor of neurology swept by with an entourage of neophytes in tow. When he stopped at my bed, I seized the chance to ask some questions. “Will this happen to me again?”
“It can, but it’s unlikely,” he said. “It only recurs in four per cent of cases.”
“I’ve read on the Mayo Clinic website that TGA can be triggered by sexual intercourse. Is that true?”
He looked at the floor, at his shoes, with the corners of his mouth lifting in the tiniest of discernible smiles.
“It could possibly do, but we don’t know for sure. There’s nothing you can do about it now, so don’t stop doing what you’re doing,” he said.
What he did explain was that TGA occurs when a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is where memories are stored and processed, gets more blood than it’s expecting, and switches off. So, the change in blood flow is the trigger. And while the hippocampus is switched off, it can’t lay down new memories. But that effect is temporary and the hippocampus later recovers.
Free to leave the hospital at last, I lurched home feeling incredibly anxious, tired and confused. I still didn’t know exactly why this had happened or whether it would happen again. I still don’t really know. Neither does the medical fraternity. It reminds me of the old adage: “We know more about space than the brain”. Isn’t it strange that we know so little about this organism that runs the world and us?
Over the following months, I sought various forms of medical advice to explain the crippling anxiety that remained with me, and I sought neuropsychological testing to see if there was any lasting memory damage. For some months I struggled with short-term memory loss, where the names that I knew that I knew were not tripping off my tongue. The brain tests and scans revealed there was no lasting damage and gradually I began to feel less anxious and less afraid of some unseen, looming bogey.
A year after the TGA, my birthday was coming up and I wanted to celebrate my increasing assurance. More than anything else, I wanted to ride a horse on Myall Beach at Cape Tribulation, just as I had 15 years ago when I was on top of the world. I had to prove to myself that I was free from this unnamed fear and anxiety.
I flew to Cairns, drove three hours north and stepped into the rainforest. An immense peace and serenity cloaked me as I walked in this ancient place. The Japanese call this ‘forest bathing’, a practice that relieves the stress of the city in our daily lives.
But the biggest thrill of all was sitting astride a beautiful horse called Ashley on my birthday, strutting through the shallows … while keeping a wary eye open for crocs.