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 out of the blue five years ago. It took away memories I've never been able to recover and I have no memory of it happening.

As I lay in a hospital bed, my partner Tony had to explain that at around 3am, Thad 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 don't remember this. The last thing! 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 Tony.

The paramedics quickly established that I required further assistance and took me to hospital, where I kept rambling incoherently. At the hospital, I remembered who Tony was. And soon afterwards, he showed me a photograph 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, Erin and Phoebe, aged 12, 10 and eight at the time. On hearing my answer, he exhaled the breath he had anxiously been holding.

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.