I was starting to panic, but I couldn’t move, my legs were immobilised, and there seemed to be some sort of restrain around my midriff, but I couldn’t find out how to release it; I was spooked now, I just wanted to run out of that scary white room, from that ‘wife’ of mine, whoever she was, just run until I found something I knew for certain, something that would give me something to cling to while I tried to figure out who I was, what was happening to me, and why.
“No, Jakku-san, not to do that, you not well, please to lie down, stay still, please!” begged that beautiful girl (my… wife?), her soft cool hands on my face, and she did calm me; I felt an instant connection with her, an almost-memory, I had been here before, with her hands on my face like that, I was certain, but the memory was too elusive, and I gave it up as a fantasy. But she had the loveliest, softest hands, and she was beautiful; perhaps she really was my wife? I could do worse, a small part of me prompted from deep down inside.
As I looked more closely at her, I saw the tear tracks on her cheeks, the quivering of her bottom lip; she was crying, and smiling, and she had lovely soft little hands, three things I now knew for certain out of a whole world that was a complete mystery to me.
“Who… what… my name, what’s my name?” I finally managed to croak out, my voice sounding rusty and querulous. The girl looked quizzically at me, as if she hadn’t heard me correctly.
“My name, please what’s my name?” I asked her again, and now I saw a look of alarm on her face as she backed away from my side, retreating all the way to the door, to tug it open and start screaming for a doctor. A man in a dark suit came almost immediately, pausing to have a quick word with the girl, my… wife, then came up to my bedside, a smile on his face.
“Hello Jack, how are you feeling?” he asked me as he took my wrist and looked at his watch
Jack, my name was Jack, so far so good. My turn.
“I feel alright, except… I don’t know why I’m here, or where this is, or my name, or … anything. Who am I, what am I doing here, why can’t I remember anything?” I was beginning to panic, and he reached down and patted my arm, then pulled down my lower eyelid and flashed a tiny torch in it, doing the same with the other eye.
“In answer to your question earlier, your name is John Cameron, but everyone you know calls you “Jack”; does that ring any bells?”
I shook my head, feeling the panic start to rise up faster now, and he put his hand on my chest, gently but firmly pushing me back down again.
“That doesn’t matter right now, Jack, just relax, you had a serious head injury, and things are a little jumbled right now, but I hope your memories will begin to return as your recovery progresses. How do you feel, any pain or headaches, or anything else you want to tell me about?”
I shook my head as I asked him; “Who are you, where am I, what is this place?”
He began to examine my eyes, shining a tiny torch in each one as he pulled down the lower lids.
“My name is Michael Hunter, I’m Head of Neurology and Neurovascular Medicine here at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, in London. You were brought here after a head trauma, and have been here ever since. You’ve actually been progressing remarkably well; you’ve been slowly waking up for several weeks now, but this is the first time you’ve actually been lucid.”
Several weeks?
“How long have I been here?” I asked, almost afraid to ask, but I had to know.
He looked at me levelly.
“You were brought in here on Friday 22nd June. Today is the 10th of December, a day your young lady’s going to mark in her calendar! She’s been here every day, waiting for you to wake up again, and now here you are. Welcome back!”
I wasn’t listening. Six months, I’d been here six months! What the hell had happened to me, and why couldn’t I remember it, or her, or me, or anything?
Dr. Hunter leaned over me.
“Listen, Jack, I know this feels strange and upsetting, but we’re going to do our best to straighten this out and have you back on your feet, but I can’t make you any promises. You had a serious injury to the temporal lobe, and it seems to have disrupted your long-term memories; hopefully that will begin to resolve itself; Retrograde Amnesia such as yours is often temporary, and your injury doesn’t seem to have damaged the basic functioning of how you process memory storage; you can still remember how to speak, understand English, move, feel curiosity, basic functions, but encouraging.”
He tapped his teeth pensively with his pen as he wrote notes on a clipboard hanging on the foot of the bead.
“Your emotional responses seem to be at optimal, so none of the things that make you “you” have been severely disrupted; what seems to be inaccessible to you right now is your long-term memory. This may well be a temporary traumatic reaction and may dissipate as memory begins to reassert itself. Right now, though, your semantic, procedural and episodic memory seem to have been impaired, which is why you have no recall at present, but memory is a funny thing; not much is known about how it works, but current thinking is that it’s distributed throughout the entire brain, so there may well be a slow return to an almost complete recall; we don’t know for certain, but the fact that so much else of your memory encoding seems to be unimpaired is a good sign; you still remember how to talk and so on. Click your fingers for me, please, both hands.”
I did so, and he smiled.
“Good, now close your eyes and point at your ears.”
Again I did so, and he patted my shoulder.
“Okay, Jack, that’s good, open your eyes now. Your procedural and sensory memory seems to be functional, as is your spatial awareness; you remembered how to carry out a simple action without hesitation; It’s a crude test, but always a good sign, but what it means is, if for instance you could ride a bike before, or play the guitar, or paint, you probably still can. We’ll see if we can work out a way to get you back the rest of what you’ve apparently lost, but, and this is a big but, there are no guarantees; there may be lasting short-term memory retention or formation issues, we just don’t know; if you can remember this conversation tomorrow, we’ll know for sure. One of my professors used to say that if the brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we’d be so simple we wouldn’t be able to!”
He smiled encouragingly.
“There are no physical effects of your injury, other than you’ll probably feel a little wobbly for a few days until you get used to walking again; your motor skills are fine, just rusty, and you have inevitably lost a certain amount of muscle mass and tone through being immobile for so long, but after we’ve run a few tests, I see no reason why you can’t go home in a few days. However, I would like you back here as soon as you’re up to it so we can continue our investigations. And now there’s someone here who’s been waiting to see you again for quite a while now!”
He leaned forward and whispered “her name’s Teruko!”
As he made to leave I plucked at his sleeve.
“What happened to me? What kind of trauma? Was it an accident?”
He looked grave, his lips pursed as he thought.
“You were mugged; you tried to fight back, but the mugger had a gun, he… shot you, and the bullet struck you low in the left Temporal Lobe, before lodging in the cerebral cortex, traumatising the Reticular Activating System, which regulates sleep, arousal and the sleep-waking transition mechanism; a traumatic injury such as the one you suffered is what triggered the coma; in effect, it flicked a switch and shut off the lights. Luckily for you it was probably a defective round; if it had hit any harder we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I was the one who removed it and closed, but the resultant trauma was what kept you comatose. However, the brain is a remarkably resilient organ, and as we monitored you we were able to track changes and improvements along the way as the RAS gradually reasserted itself. I know it sounds trite, but, given the circumstances, you were remarkably lucky, or maybe there is a God, I’ll have to let you work that out for yourself!”