I had a baby – then lost my memory, part 2
Lives Less Ordinary

I had a baby – then lost my memory, part 2

B1IntermediateJune 29, 202639 min
  • Interview
  • Health

After an undiagnosed case of pre-eclampsia caused catastrophic brain damage and amnesia, Samina Ali returned home from hospital to begin a long recovery. At 29, she found herself relearning the basics of daily life – how to walk, speak and make sense of the world around her. She could still communicate in Urdu, the language of her childhood partly spent in India, but much of her recent life in California felt unreachable. Her husband was a stranger, and her newborn son Ishmael someone she struggled to recognise. The part of her that had once been a writer also seemed ou...

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after page, and I had no memory that I'd written them.

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1:13

I remember going through the manuscript that I had written, page after page after page after page, and I had no memory that I'd written them. It was like pulling a book from my bookshelf that someone else had written.

1:29

And I was so deeply frightened that I just deleted the manuscript. And then I came back to the computer and my fingers were going on the typewriter.

1:40

I was typing words. Everything was making sense in my brain. But the next day I would reread what I had written and it was sheer gibberish.

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