The day I lost my mind: My experience with transient global amnesia

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 never will. What happened and why remains a total mystery to me.

I only know what those people close to me told me happened. I’ve only got secondhand memories of the day in my life when my brain froze.

What is memory exactly?

I’d never asked this question until I lost mine.

The Macquarie Dictionary describes it as “the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving impressions, or of recalling or recognising previous experiences”.

One minute mine was there, just as it always had been. Like a well-worn, much-loved suitcase at the back of the cupboard. 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.

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Consternation set in. Not just mine, but those people closest to me. They worried that I was repeating myself, asking the same questions over and over.

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 replied. After my fourth call, they phoned my daughter, Lola.

“We’re worried about Dasha. Can you check up and see what’s happening with her? She keeps phoning and repeating the same thing,” they said.

By the time Lola reached my house, I was agitated and disorientated. Then my friend returned to my house very alarmed. He’d given me a book as he’d left earlier, saying, “I hope you enjoy it.”

“What book?” I replied.

He left perplexed. But he returned after a phone conversation with his sister in which she wondered if my confusion indicated I was having a stroke.

He met my daughter at the door and I introduced them five times over, as I knew they’d never met before and was mindful of manners.

They decided to call an ambulance as I was clearly distressed and agitated, saying “Something’s not right with me, something’s not right.”

A ride down memory lane

I was dressed for dinner, wearing my brand new, pointy toed, red suede, sling-back shoes for the first time. My daughter suggested I should change them for something more utilitarian and brought out some sensible Birkenstock sandals.

“No, no, no”, I said. “I’m wearing these.” But Lola was right, as the sling backs kept slipping off as I clattered down two flights of stairs to the waiting ambulance, which I had now forgotten was coming.

I was irritated and confused when I saw it, despite the fact that it was festooned in gaudy rainbow pom poms to celebrate Sydney’s Mardi Gras weekend.

I refused to get in, 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 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 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.

Gently the ambos, who thought I was having a stroke, and my daughter Lola lured me into the ambulance. They gave me aspirin as I complained of a bad headache and delivered me to Prince of Wales emergency around 6:00pm.

Lola rode with me in the back of 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 remember being in the ambulance, nor arriving at the hospital. But bizarrely, I see this all happening now in my mind as if it’s my memories, because of what I was told happened.

Ruling out other causes

Once I was in emergency, the tests started. Blood tests, a CT scan, an EEG test, balance tests, urine tests, speech tests. Any test possible to rule out a stroke, given my history.

Much later in the evening 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? A transient global amnesia episode, commonly known as a TGA.

“It’s a neurological enigma that occurs predominantly to those in the 55 to 70-year-old bracket,” the head nurse said.

Me. At 60-something and counting.

Neurologists say there is no one definitive cause that triggers a TGA. Some say stress. Some say trauma. Some say intense physical exertion, immersion in cold water, or sexual intercourse. But there’s no medical evidence to say for sure.

Just as mysteriously as it comes, it subsides after 4 to 12 hours. The memory returns, bringing fatigue, headaches, anxiety and a fuzzy brain.

I still have no memory whatsoever 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.

Lola slept the night in an upright chair beside me, like a temple lion. I tried to sleep fitfully with the aid of a sedative to relieve the intense pain and to try and banish the noise of the night-time emergency cases coming and going.

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.

The next morning, the neurology registrar did her rounds of the ward and Lola said, “The emergency ward nurse said last night she thought Dasha had a TGA. Is that what it is?”

The neurology registrar was not impressed. “She should never have said that. We don’t know for sure at this stage. The tests so far reveal it’s not a stroke, but we need to see the results of an MRI brain scan to know more. She’ll be moved to the neurology ward today.”

“How long will she be here?” Lola asked.

“Can’t say for sure,” the registrar replied.

Grappling with a mystery

And so began my real distress. Cooped up in hospital when I was sure nothing was wrong with me other than a headache and a fuzzy brain. I still couldn’t remember how I got there.

Blood tests. Blood pressure tests, the results of the lumbar puncture tests and the MRI. All clear. No stroke activity. Was it just a brain fart I had?

In the absence of any other causes, by the end of day two there was tacit medical agreement that it must have been a transient global amnesia episode.

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 coloured drawings and handwritten song lyrics.

I remembered every one of the drawings. I knew I’d seen them before. Each one was lodged in my memory bank. This is my only memory from that day.

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Days later I asked my friend who gave me the book if we’d looked at it together that afternoon. “Yes,” he said. “Don’t you remember?” I had to confess I didn’t.

But I still didn’t have any real information about this mysterious condition. Bored and lying in my hospital ward bed I hit up doctor Google.

This information just rattled me further. Although, Googling TGA was strangely comforting.

I didn’t feel quite so weird or alone now. I was part of an elite club. All of whom lost their minds for a number of hours and had no recall ever again of what took place. Except everyone remembered who they were and recognised family — as I had done.

One small detail on the TGA Mayo Clinic website caught my attention.

It listed one of the possible causes of the onset of a TGA as sexual intercourse.

Hmm… I wonder… I thought to myself. But a delicate situation. How do you ask an intimate friend, “Darling, did we make love together? I just can’t remember.”

Memo to self: pursue delicately.

Could it happen again?

Next morning, day three of my captivity, the professor of neurology swept by with an entourage of well-dressed neophytes in tow.

When he stopped at my bed, I seized the opportunity to ask some questions.

“Will this happen to me again?”

“It can, but not likely,” he said. “It only reoccurs in 4 per cent of cases.”

“I’ve read on the Mayo Clinic website that a TGA episode can be triggered by sexual intercourse. Is that true?”

He looked down at the floor, 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 agreed that I could be discharged as, while the tests were not conclusive, they were pretty sure I’d had a TGA episode. But no-one could really say for sure.

I lurched home feeling anxious – incredibly anxious, tired and confused.

What had just happened to me and why? Was it going to happen again? And could I stop it?

There were no conclusive answers to these questions, and I still don’t really know what happened to me. Neither does the medical fraternity that treated me.

By default, they determined I had a transient global amnesia episode where for approximately 12 hours, my memory stopped functioning. Just stopped.

It was treated by everyone as a mysterious ‘thing’ that could not be fully explained.

It reminded me of the old adage, “We know more about space than the brain.”

And it was this driving thought that sent me off on a mission to find out what happened to me and why and to find others who experienced the same thing.

The most reassuring and valuable resource I found was a members only TGA Facebook group.

Dasha Ross is a documentary maker who is on a mission to discover the mysteries behind TGA.