A woman has opened up about her super rare brain condition which causes her to temporarily lose decades worth of memories.
29-year-old Chloe Barnard from Melton Mowbray, England, struggles to remember anything that happened after the age of six during episodes triggered by a brain condition that doctors blamed on the stroke she suffered at the age of 19.
While the young lady eventually regains her memories, the moments right after she wakes up are the hardest.
As she admitted, she frequently mistakes her husband James, 39, for a kidnapper. At one point, she even went as far as threatening the man with a wrench after finding herself in his bed.
“I can go back to being any age. I’ve been back to being six years old. That was horrifying. One night, me and James had a fight that wasn’t massive but I’d gone to bed because I was mardy with him and something woke me up,” Chloe recalled.
“I went downstairs and there was a stairgate, I didn’t recognize the house but I thought ‘it must be mine because there’s a staircase and I’m only six.’
“My partner was on the sofa with the dog, which I didn’t know was mine. I sat on the stairs and said ‘who are you and who is the dog? I want my mummy and my daddy.’”
She continued: “He knew what to do and not to panic. He got me back upstairs and he got into bed completely naked and told me to get into bed. I told him I wasn’t getting into bed with a paedo and that I want my mummy and daddy. I was stood there with my nan’s teddy bear.
“I tried to phone the police but he took my phone. I didn’t want him to touch me. I picked up a spanner so I knew I could hurt him if I needed to. He asked what I was going to do with it and I said if he came near me, I’d hit him with it and that I wanted my mummy and daddy.”
After Chloe calmed down and talked to her parents over the phone, she eventually agreed to go back to sleep. When she woke the next morning, she was “totally fine.”
According to Chloe, she only suffers extreme memory loss once every few months.
While it is not entirely clear what triggers these episodes, Chloe believes that stress and tiredness play a huge factor.
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