I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia Read Online Free

them carried a backboard that was meant for me.
    A big red fire engine with flashing lights and firefighters rushing around in jackets and hats must have made for quite a scene outside the door of our little home. Did our neighbors step outside to see what was going on? Did they stay indoors and peer through curtains? Did other people on El Greco wonder what could have drawn the Fort Worth Fire Department to the Mecks’ door? Did they care?
    Inside our house no one was talking much, but Jim remembers glimpsing the frequent nonverbal cues passed back and forth between the commander and the paramedics, a faint shaking of heads and furrowing of brows, all seeding a sense of foreboding. “I remember them being very grim,” Jim recalls. “You know: it just did not look good, not good at all.”
    The paramedics bandaged an inch-long gash on my forehead: such a small wound, but so much blood, pooling in a three-foot diameter around my head. Workers carefully fitted a cervical brace around my neck. Then several of them encircled me and ever so gently lifted me onto the backboard. They strapped my body to the board and rushed out of the house to load me into the ambulance.
    Jim asked if he could come along. “No, sir,” a paramedic told him, “you can’t go in the ambulance. We aren’t covered for that.”
    The ambulance door swung closed, and I began my journey to the hospital. I would like to tell you that the paramedic gazed pensively at my vital signs, steadied my wounded head, held my hand, and even though I couldn’t hear the words, he told me in a thick Texas accent, “Everything’s gonna be just fine.” But Jim wasn’t there, and I don’t remember, so there is nothing more to tell.

2

Confusion
    —ELO
    I have read through all of the medical records of my stay in the hospital, and, quite honestly, I haven’t a clue as to what much of it means. There seems to be a lot of secret medical language that us patient types aren’t meant to understand. But I do, unfortunately, notice plenty of discrepancies among the hundreds of pages of records from the hospital. In the notes from one doctor on May 25, 1988, it says that the ceiling fan struck me on the left temple, but I was actually hit on the right side. There are accounts written about my condition on June 9 describing my impaired memory, impaired communication, dysfunctional mobility, impaired judgment, and decreased attention span, and yet I was discharged the very next day. It was noted on May 31 that mylong-term memory “seems fairly unaffected.” (Really? Hmm. Interesting.) There are several pages included in my records that aren’t even mine.
    I guess I expected, and was hoping, for those records to somehow hold the key that would give me answers and fill in gaps. I was hoping that these official records would be just that. Instead, the written record just raises even more questions about why I am the way I am and what the medical community did and did not do when I was first injured. It is difficult for me to piece together all the facts of my stay in the hospital from these discombobulated accounts, but I will do my best.

    Jim always talks about how after I was whisked away in the ambulance, he can remember climbing into his powder-blue Chevy Malibu in our driveway. But he doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital. He always says that he arrived before the ambulance, ruining his car’s transmission in the process.
    My records show that I was registered into Harris Methodist Southwest Hospital at 6:30 P.M. , a Caucasian female, age twenty-two, of Presbyterian faith. The diagnosis, in capital letters: “CEILING FAN FELL ON HEAD.” The bottom of the page bears my husband’s hurried signature: James R. Meck.
    Jim thinks he phoned his parents, and then my parents, calling collect. Remember this was the 1980s, and there were no cell phones. My mom recalls the conversation this way: “Jim said that you had had an accident. And I said, ‘What now?’