A bath, a tooth, a fall from a hay loft

Tales of memory loss

When I was a junior in high school, I came down with a case of flu over the Thanksgiving break. Dehydrated and possibly running a fever, I decided it was a good idea to take a hot bath. I don’t remember that impulse, why taking a bath seemed like a good idea. I don’t remember the bath. The last thing I remember from that weekend was visiting my grandmother in the nursing home, which happened several days before the bath. The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital room and having no idea how I got there.

In the in-between, I’d emerged from the bathtub, still naked, stumbled as far as my parent’s bedroom and passed out. I may or may not have hit my head on the edge of their dresser. I came back to consciousness pretty quickly, but I was confused, so my parents took me to the hospital where it became apparent that I’d lost my ability to turn short-term memories into long-term memories.

I knew who my parents were. I knew who I was. I didn’t know why I was in the hospital and every time someone told me what had happened to land me there, I forgot. About a minute later, I would ask again—“What am I doing here?” And then a minute later, I’d ask again. And again. There was a nurse whose name was Rae, spelled exactly the same as my middle name. Every time she came into my room I would be surprised to see her name tag. Every time I would tell her, “That’s my middle name.”

I don’t remember that, either. I remember lying on my side as they drained some of my spinal fluid for tests. After the test, I wasn’t supposed to raise my bed for so long, but, of course, I didn’t remember that.

Obviously, I got better. Whatever path between my short-term and long-term memory had been broken repaired itself. The doctors shrugged and called it stress, though I can’t say I felt particularly stressed at the time. I went home and went back to my life. The new memories accrued. In psychology class, we watched a documentary about Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who had a spike propelled through his head in an explosion, and I had to get up and leave the room, wandering down the high school halls feeling like I was going to throw up. The image, the idea of how Gage survived and then changed into a different person with his brain split in half. It was too much.

This week, I had a tooth pulled and the oral surgeon used IV sedation. IV sedation is different from general anesthesia. It’s easier on the body. In the sort of IV sedation I experienced, I never lost consciousness. I remember sitting in the chair as they put in the IV. I remember I got a cramp in my back. I’d been sitting in the uncomfortable dental chair for a while, waiting and listening to the sound of drilling from the room next to mine, never a soothing sound.

Photo by Rolands Zilvinskis on Unsplash

I remember the surgeon having trouble finding a vein. And then…and then, what? A blur of activity in fast forward. The surgeon and the nurses moving around me, but no memory of what they were doing, though I knew I was awake for all of it. I have no memory of pain or tugging or even the sound of whatever implements the surgeon used.

Then, I’m sitting up a little in the chair, the cap over my hair is gone, along with the drape and the blanket they’d put on me before the surgery. The nurse is talking to me. “That was so much faster than a root canal,” I say to her. She smiles. I wonder if I’ve already said this to her. If I’m repeating myself again. I wonder what else I’ve said that I no longer remember.

She tells me that in her old job they did root canals and they were so boring. She asks if I’m in pain. Then she asks again. Each time the answer is no. I feel fine. I feel totally awake and the time between when the surgeon put in the IV and now is seamless. If I concentrated hard enough, I could recover what happened in that missing gap of time. I’m certain I could. But why would I? It couldn’t have been pleasant. I let it go.

“I wasn’t asleep,” I tell my husband later. “I just can’t remember what happened.” Which means, for all intents and purposes, that it never happened.

Though that’s not exactly what it feels like, either. It’s more like someone targeted those particular moments in my brain and blurred them. Sped them up until the details disappeared. And the question that keeps echoing over the next few days is, if I have no memory of something, did it really ever happen?

I read later that IV sedation works by putting the person into a state in which new memories do not form. IV sedation puts us into an eternal present moment, one that we will never carry forward with us into the future. One that we’ll never be able to look back on. Chemical enlightenment.

When I was in the hospital all those years ago, uncertain as to how I’d gotten there, I don’t remember being afraid. I was confused, definitely. I still had the ability to read faces and emotions, so after a while, I could tell that I was upsetting my mother with my questions. I stopped asking them, even though I still didn’t have any answers. A friend from school sent me a tape of the Concrete Blonde song, “Joey,” and I listened to it over and over again. It was lonely the third night, when my mother finally went home to sleep, exhausted by my confusion. I couldn’t really worry, though, because I didn’t know what there was to worry about, except some puzzling event that had ended me up in a hospital room, alone.

Now when I think about those forty minutes or so it took to remove my tooth, that gap in my mind is so much more disturbing than the gap in my mouth where the tooth used to be. Maybe it’s the fragility of age, the sense of all the things that can go wrong if you’re not paying attention. Was the extraction easy or hard? Did I talk? What did I say? What secrets might I have revealed to that room full of strangers? What a leap of faith to put such trust in people. If I understood exactly how it all worked, would I do it again?

When I was even younger, before the incident with the flu and the bath, I fell out of a hay loft once. My foot caught on something as I fell, so I banged my head against the wood and then hung there, suspended, until someone found me and got me down. This was in the barn where our horse was stabled at the time and after that, I swore our horse had been on the opposite side of the barn. I was certain my memory was correct, that someone had moved our horse and everyone was in on the trick, convincing me that our horse had been in that stall all along. A small synapse scrambled by my fall. A tear in the fabric of my reality that never closed. Even now, I would swear to you that the stall had been moved.

I don’t think about my hospital stay much anymore. It’s become one of those stories, normal to me, shocking when I tell other people. I’m not sure how much I remember about it is true. Is that a thing that even happens? A temporary loss of the ability to make new long-term memories? My mother worried, of course, that I’d never be the same again. Was I? Am I? If we are our memories and the stories we make out of them, what happens when parts go missing?