大象传媒

Due to an illness, Miranda and her family have been forced to come to terms with her permanent memory loss...

Four years ago Miranda Hamilton endured meningitis and then encephalitis. Afterwards she was left with permanent memory loss. She could not remember how old her two daughters were and she couldn鈥檛 remember meeting and marrying her husband, James Arnold. What was more, there was no chance she ever would remember.

"James would come in to visit me in hospital, walk out the door and come back in again and I would not realise that he had been in five minutes previously. I did recognise him, but I found it very difficult when I saw the children again because the main block of memory I had lost was the past two years. So my daughters, then five years old, to my recollection were only three. So they walked in and they were huge and they were rude to me and they were just not the children that I had in my head."

James and the family also had difficulty coping with Miranda鈥檚 memory loss. "It gets less difficult as time goes on. The first couple of weeks were absolutely dreadful because Miranda was like a toddler. She didn鈥檛 recognise me from one minute to the next. She would have hallucinations, thinking that the patterns on the curtains were animals and this sort of nonsense, which is very distressing when you see your loved one in that condition."

James and Miranda say the memories are still there, she just cannot access them. "Sometimes the memories come floating into my memory but I can鈥檛 grab them. I can vaguely see them coming by and they just melt. The problem with my memory now is holding on to new things. I don鈥檛 actually know what I am going to remember. I can鈥檛 guarantee anything which is very annoying since I have some fantastic experiences but I can鈥檛 guarantee they are going to stay.

Miranda says that her daughters have been absolutely fantastic in helping her recover some of her lost memories. A particular instance where her children have helped her involved a much loved story. "There was a story that I used to tell the children on car journeys, which they loved so much, but I couldn't remember it. For the last few years, they have been asking me to tell them this story of the Dancing Horse. At Christmas we bought a computer and I asked the girls to sit down with me and tell me the Story of the Dancing Horse so that I could type it into the screen as they were going along. As the words from them were being told to me as I was typing, details of the story came back--tiny, tiny fragments of it came back and they were just delighted, really thrilled. 'Yes mummy! That鈥檚 exactly what happened!'"

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