Me too
Hey, I never thought I'd meet anyone else that had my Gray's Anatomy type syndrome. I'm 59 but at 56 I had a two hour transient global amnesia event. It is very rare, only a few people out of 100,000 ever experience one. I was working out at the gym at a boot camp type class and remember doing a push up and then the next thing I remember is my wife taking me to a clinic a couple of hours later. I functioned fairly normally, did the exercises, talked to friends in the class. They noticed I was acting oddly but thought it was just a different class clown routine I was trying since I was always cutting up in class. I did try to get in the wrong, but similar car they told me later. Anyway, after two days of tests the neurosurgeon who had seen one other case in his life of practice told me what it was. It appears to be harmless, although some recent studies link it to an increased rate of mortality, there is no peer reviewed consensus at present. It did increase the cost of the long term care insurance my wife and I just purchased because they aren't, apparently, sophisticated enough to separate regular amnesia from TGA, which is not a related condition. The best research says the cause is similar to the mechanism that causes migraines in other people, even though TGA victims may never have had a migraine headache. Physical exertion and straining, like a push up, or according to my Doc, sex, are the most common triggers of an event. It is not a repeating event although having suffered on attack does increase your odds of having a second. Anyway, after many hours of study that's all I've found out. It is a weird situation to be in, your mind works fairly normally except you cannot store a single new memory for a couple of hours. Its like a very revved up version of the movie Ground Hog Day, except you relive every five seconds over and over and at the end of it can't remember any of it. It will convince your friends that observe the event that you are crazy. One last factoid. Because of the brevity of the event and the confusion of the victim not a single TGA attack has ever been studied while in progress. The researchers would love to do an MRI or PET scan while an event is in progress but it isn't likely that will ever happen. It just takes too long to determine the victim isn't acting normally and get them to medical care and the brain is back to normal before the first test can be performed.