I told a doctor, " I had amnesia". He said that’s common with people who have schizophrenia. Oh really?
But I really did have a form of amnesia in the first several months after I got diagnosed.
When I first got sick all I could think about was my illness. And that’s because I couldn’t ignore it if I wanted to, it consumed my life and effected everything I did, it seemed like I had had schizophrenia forever. My life was taking walks, and sitting in a chair fighting to keep my sanity every day.
And then one day I was laying on my dingy mattress on the floor in my little dingy room in the group home for people with schizophrenia and it dawned on me. I used to have friends. I grew up with Ted and Dave. I knew them since I was in sixth grade until about two years after high school. We had a lot of fun together partying, driving all over, bugging the girls on our street to make them mad.
All this was just 4 or 5 months before I got sick. I had completely forgotten my childhood friends. I had forgotten working on cars while drinking beer. And I had forgotten all about “Narc Park” the fond name of our local park where all the stoners hung out. It was so weird, it was like my former life had vanished and never happened.
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Very true ponder… When I was in hospital my home memories… even family felt so foreign if I even thought about them at all.
It took a while to try to recall any of the life I had before I was admitted.
Good ponder…
I had a scary episode about 4 years go where I got lost driving home from work.
I had bad commands to stab myself but I was able to call the police on myself.
When my son arrived home the ambulance arrived and luckily it was a special mental health unit.
They new just what to do.
And assessed me by saying he lived in Scotland and it took me several minutes to figure out that was a long commute.
They kept laughing and telling jokes which was just the thing to do so I totally didn’t wig out and get scared.
I could not for the life of me remember my name or birthday.
I disintegrated in the ER and started waving around the metal detector someone had left on a chair and said back back or I’ll zap you with my crystalizer. The funny thing is I remember doing stuff but I had no will to control it.
This scared the daylights out of me for a long while.
But at home with no stress or Job on sick leave, after 5 weeks I was patched up enough to go back to work slowly.
So now I feel like that was my worst and its only up from there…
That’s good to hear because I have often had feelings of amnesia - I just thought I wasn’t myself and, furthermore, the person I was didn’t know me or I him. So I called it being possessed instead. By my adopted brother, my teenage doc and by Gerald Ford. I don’t mind having a friend in my head, it’s the strangers in my head that bother me.