A woman who was admitted to hospital with a simple headache now says she can't remember anything from the last 30 years.
Back in October 2018, when she was 56 years old, Kim Denicola developed a pain in her head that gave her blurry vision and left her feeling extremely dizzy.
The grandmother, from Louisiana, was at a Bible study group in Baton Rogue when the incident took place and was immediately rushed to a nearby medical facility.
When she finally woke up in the emergency room, she seemed confused. However, things took a turn for the worse when Denicola revealed that she had no recollection that she was married or had two children. In fact, she had no memory of the last 30 years.
"I’ve lost a lot of Christmases, so it’s a big deal," she told news outlet WAFB.
"It’s unbelievable to me as it probably is to other people," she continued. "Never in my wildest dreams did I get up and go to Bible study and think I’m going to wake up in the hospital and I’m going to be 60 years old."
Denicola could not recall her own family members let alone that computers existed or that the President of the United States had switched multiple times.
"'Do you know what today is, what year are you in?'" she recalled a nurse asking when she was conscious. "I said, 'Yeah, 1980.' And she said, 'Can you tell me who the president is?' I said, 'Yes, Ronald Regan.' And she stopped."
"TVs are now smart. The TV I remember was a box that sat against a wall that we had to get up and go change the channel," she told the outlet two months after the incident.
It's almost been five years since the now 60-year-old suffered the memory loss, and she has not yet managed to retrieve them back.
As per the New York Post, Denicola was diagnosed with "extensive amnesia", which is also known as transient global amnesia (TGA), but even after multiple scans and tests, doctors cannot determine what caused the shocking blow.
"They told me, if by now I haven’t gotten it, then I probably won’t," she told WAFB.
Despite the issues, it has been reported that the Louisiana native has managed to re-kindle her love with her husband and has re-lived her children's childhoods through an array of photos and videos.
"I may have lost my memories, but guess what? We can make new ones," she told the outlet.
According to the National Institutes of Health, transient global amnesia (TGA) is a "temporary, anterograde amnesia with an acute onset that usually occurs in middle-aged and older individuals. It is often precipitated by particularly strenuous activity, high-stress events, or coitus, but it can be seen with migraines as well."
While some people only suffer memory loss for approximately 24 hours, it seems as though some cases can persist to more serious ones.
Studies have been inconclusive as to whether there are risk factors for the development of TGA, though some have suggested an association with a history of prior heart disease, migraines, or hyperlipidemia.
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