Woman: Rebooted

[owlice]

Gaithersburg woman earns college degree two decades after complete memory loss
By Daniel de Vise, Published: May 21

A community college commencement is, for many, a celebration of second chances.

Consider Su Meck. The 45-year-old homemaker from Gaithersburg graduated Friday from Montgomery College with an associate degree in music. It’s the culmination of a life that, in most senses of the word, began at 22.

In February 1988, a ceiling fan fell on Meck’s head. The blow erased her memory, and she awoke after a week in a coma with the mental capacity of a young child. She no longer knew her husband or her two baby sons. She barely spoke and could not read or write, walk or eat, dress or drive.

“It was Su 2.0,” said Jim Meck, her husband, a systems engineer. “She had rebooted.”

Su Meck had been in her kitchen that evening, making macaroni and cheese. She picked up Patrick, her 6-month-old son, and held him aloft. His body brushed against a ceiling fan and somehow unhooked it. It plummeted and struck Su’s head, according to Jim, the only one in the family with a memory of that day.

An MRI exam showed her brain suffused with cracks, “like shaken Jell-O,” her husband was told. The injury left her with complete retrograde amnesia, the inability to remember the past, a condition sometimes called Hollywood amnesia because it seldom happens outside the movies.

More here (I hope... some articles require [free] registration), and well worth the read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/edu ... print.html