In Canada, a woman suffered cardiac arrest and lost her memory
At the age of 29, Katrina O’Neal suffered a cardiac arrest while playing baseball. The woman was without oxygen for 22 minutes before falling into a coma that lasted three weeks. When O’Neal woke up, she was sure she was only 15 years old. She didn’t recognize the loved ones who had come into her life as an adult, and she had also forgotten that she was a mother of three. “I went back to my childhood and just wanted my mom to be there for me. My brain was telling me I was a child,” she says.
According to O’Neal, at first she had difficulty remembering new information as well as recalling events from the past. Gradually, some of the memories came back. However, the woman admitted that much of what she knows now was told to her by other people.
While O’Neal was recovering, her mother took care of the children. After the woman’s condition stabilized, she returned to a life she did not remember. O’Neal noted that it was hard for her to manage her responsibilities and raise her children. “I was very fortunate that my children were patient and helped me and realized that things weren’t the way they used to be. But most importantly, they just wanted to be with their mom,” she says.
As Howard Chertkov, a neurologist and senior research fellow at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, explains, O’Neal’s memory loss was partly due to the fact that the lack of oxygen affected her hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for short-term memory and the subsequent translation of information into long-term memory. “The peculiarity of the hippocampus is that it is very sensitive to a lack of oxygen,” Chertkov notes.
According to the neurologist, even when the hippocampus is damaged, the rest of the brain continues to function. This is why the woman, who worked as a bus driver before her cardiac arrest, remembered how to drive after the coma. “Long-term memories from before the incident are still in her brain. She just can’t retrieve them,” Chertkov claims.
