#4: Retrograde Amnesia -- The Vow

I read a book called The Vow, by Kim and Krickitt Carpenter and John Perry which relates to retrograde amnesia. It is a tragic, true story about Kim and Krickitt Carpenter and what they went through in their marriage. They had been together for two years and had only been married a few short months when they had a severe car accident on the way to their parents' house for Thanksgiving. Krickitt was driving and suffered severe brain damage, causing her to lose all memory of anything that happened in the last two years or so prior to her accident. Kim and Krickitt struggled to survive as a married couple as Kim desperately tried to get her to remember him at all. Finally, they realized that Krickitt would not remember the last two years of her life, so they began their relationship again.

This book relates to retrograde amnesia and the impact of brain damage on memory we learned about in chapter six on memory. Retrograde amnesia is when a person experiences a loss of memory for events that occurred before some brain injury. Krickitt's brain injury was so severe that she could not remember her husband or anything that happened in the last two years before the accident.