The man whose memory slipped away

Scott Bolzan’s memory was wiped clean by a simple stumble, said Susannah Cahalan in the New York Post. In December 2008, the private jet company CEO slipped in his office bathroom in Scottsdale, Ariz., and woke up in a hospital. He couldn’t remember his name. Worse still, he couldn’t even recall what the word “name” meant. “Who the hell was I?” he thought. Bolzan, 49, grew even more confused when the nurse said that Joan, his wife of 24 years and the mother of his two children, was on the phone. “What’s a wife?” he asked.

Bolzan had suffered an extreme and untreatable form of memory loss. He couldn’t picture his teenage children, but felt an instant connection when he saw them. “Family meant something more to me than did the doctors or nurses.” After being discharged, he scoured photo albums and revisited his childhood home in the hope of jogging his memory, but nothing registered. His loss caused him to frequently burst into tears, but he has lately begun to accept his fate. “[I learned] to face the reality that I had experienced a death—in myself. I should grieve the old Scott, rather than try to bring him back.”

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