He was walking beside her, his brows drawn together, his eyes plastered to the latest batch of results from another dozen tests. So what did he mean, she didn’t have…?
Terrible suspicion mushroomed, clouding the perfection of the day.
Could he think she’d capitalized on a transient memory loss and had been stringing him along for the past four weeks? Or worse, that she’d never had memory loss, that she was cunning enough, with a convoluted enough agenda, to have faked it from the start?
And she blurted it out, “You think I’m pretending?”
“What?” He raised his eyes sluggishly, stared ahead into nothingness as if the meaning of her words was oozing through his mind, searching for comprehension. Then it hit him. Hard. His head jerked toward her, his frown spectacular. “No.”
She waited for him to elaborate. He didn’t, buried his head back into the tests.
So she prodded. “So what do you mean I don’t have PTA? I woke up post-trauma with amnesia. Granted, it’s not a classic case, but what else could it be?”
Instead of answering, he held the door of the terrace pergola open for her. She stepped out into the late March midday, barely stopped herself from moaning as the sweet saltiness of the sea breeze splashed her face, weaved insistent fingers through her hair.
He looked down at her as they walked, as if he hadn’t heard her question. She shivered, not from the delicious coolness of the wind, but from the caress of his gaze, which followed the wind’s every movement over her face and through her hair.
At least, that was how it felt to her. It was probably all in her mind, and he was lost in thought and not seeing her at all.
He suddenly turned his eyes again to the tests, validating her interpretation. “Let’s review your condition, shall we? You started out having total retrograde amnesia, with all the memories formed before the accident lost. Then you started retrieving ‘islands of memory,’ when you recalled those ‘skeletal’ events. But you didn’t suffer from any degree of anterograde amnesia, since you had no problems creating new memories after the injury. Taking all that into account, and that it has been over four weeks and the ‘islands’ have not coalesced into a uniform landmass…”
“As uniform as could be, you mean,” she interrupted. “Even so-called healthy people don’t remember everything in their lives-most things not in reliable detail and some things not at all.”
“Granted. But PTA that lasts that long indicates severe brain injury, and it’s clear from your clinical condition and all of your tests that you are not suffering from any cognitive, sensory, motor or coordination deficits. An isolated PTA of this magnitude is unheard of. That is why I’m leaning toward diagnosing you with a hybrid case of amnesia. The trauma might have triggered it, but the major part of your memory deficit is psychogenic, not organic.”
She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “So we’re back to what I said minutes after I regained consciousness. I wanted to forget.”
“Yes. You diagnosed yourself fresh out of a coma.”
“It wasn’t really a diagnosis. I was trying to figure out why I had no other symptoms. When I didn’t find an explanation, I thought either my medical knowledge had taken a hit, or that neurology was never my strong point in my parallel existence. I thought you would know that cases like mine exist. But they don’t. Turns out I don’t really have amnesia, I’m just hysterical.”
His gaze whipped to hers, fierce, indignant. “Psychogenic amnesia is no less real than organic. It’s a self-preservation mechanism. I also wouldn’t label the psychogenic ingredient of your memory loss as hysterical, but rather functional or dissociative. In fact, I don’t support the hysterical nomenclature and what it’s come to be associated with-willful and weak-willed frenzy.”
Hot sweetness unfurled inside her. He was defending her to herself. Pleasure surged to her lips, making them tingle. “So you think I have a repressed-memory type functional amnesia.”
He nodded, ultraserious. “Yes. Here, take a look at this. This is your last MRI.” She looked. “It’s called functional imaging. After structural imaging revealed no physical changes in your brain, I looked at the function. You see this?” She did. “This abnormal brain activity in the limbic system led to your inability to recall stressful and traumatic events. The memories are stored in your long-term memory, but access to them has been impaired through a mixture of trauma and psychological defense mechanisms. The abnormal activity explains your partial memory recovery. But now that I’m certain there’s nothing to worry about organically, I’m relaxed about when total recovery occurs.”
“If it ever does.” If he was right, and she couldn’t think how he wasn’t, she might be better off if it never did.
Psychogenic amnesia sufferers included soldiers and childhood abuse, rape, domestic violence, natural disaster and terrorist attack victims. Sufferers of severe enough psychological stress, internal conflict or intolerable life situations. And if her mind had latched on to the injury as a trigger to purge her memories of Mel and her life with him, she’d probably suffered all three.
But that still didn’t explain her pregnancy or the honeymoon they were heading to when they’d had the accident.
Rodrigo stemmed the tide of confusion that always overcame her when she came up against those points.
“Anyway,” he said. “While explanations have been proposed to explain psychogenic amnesia, none of them have been verified as the mechanism that fits all types. I prefer to set aside the Freudian, personal semantic belief systems and betrayal trauma theories to explain the condition. I lean toward the theory that explains the biochemical imbalance that triggers it.”
“That’s why you’re a neurosurgeon and not a neurologist or psychiatrist. Where others are content to deal with insults to the psyche, you dig down to the building blocks of the nervous system, cell by cell, neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter.”
“I admit, I like to track any sign or symptom, physical or psychological, back to its causative mechanism, to find the ‘exactly how’ after others explain the ‘why.’”
“And that’s why you’re a researcher and inventor.”
He focused on her eyes for a second before he turned his own back to the tests, his skin’s golden-bronze color deepening.
He was embarrassed!
She’d noticed on many occasions that, although he was certain of his abilities, he wasn’t full of himself and didn’t expect or abide adulation, despite having every reason to feel superior and to demand and expect being treated as such.