THE DAY I FORGOT MY LIFE

After a seizure erased her memories, Rachel Hazell, 48, realised she'd have to create new ones

- JULIA SIDWELL

My seizure came in the middle of the night five years ago. It took away memories I have never been able to recover and I have no memory of it happening. As I lay in a hospital bed, my husband Tony had to explain that, in the middle of the night, at around 3am, I had been making strange noises that had woken him up. Thinking I wasn’t breathing, he started doing CPR on me, before asking our eldest daughter to call for an ambulance.

By the time the paramedics arrived, I had regained consciousness, though I have no memory of this. The last thing I recall is sitting on our bed at home with an ambulance crew surrounding me. They had tried to establish my level of awareness by asking me if I knew who the man was sitting next to me. I’d said, ‘Of course, I know. That’s my dad.’ It was in fact my husband Tony.

The paramedics quickly decided that I required further assistance and took me to hospital, where I kept rambling incoherently. At the hospital, I remembered who Tony was. Soon afterwards, he showed me a photo of our daughters on his phone and asked, ‘Do you know who they are?’

Bewildered and confused by what was going on, I slumped with relief as I recognised their faces. The girls in the picture were our daughters, Libby, then 12, Erin, 10, and Phoebe, eight. On hearing my answer, he exhaled the breath he’d anxiously been holding.

‘I KNEW MY FAMILY, BUT NOTHING ELSE’

But as I tried to recall my memories of carrying them each for nine months, giving birth to them and raising them, my mind was blank. There was nothing. What’s more, we had no idea if the seizure I’d just suffered had wiped these memories temporarily, or whether they had been deleted forever.