A mum has revealed how she woke up to have lost 20 years of memories, having contracted a deadly condition after catching a cold.
Claire Muffett-Reece, 43, went to bed one night in 2021 thinking she just had a bit of a cold, but ended up falling into a coma for 16 days.
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Speaking on Steph's Packed Lunch to mark World Encephalitis Day today (22 February), Claire was joined by husband Scott, 44, to speak about the 'horrible' experience - hoping that by sharing her story, others might be able to look out for the warning signs.
Scott recalled: "Claire, for around about two weeks, had been suffering from a cold that she picked up from our youngest, Max. Just gradually deteriorating, getting worse and worse, and getting more and more lethargic.
“And then she went to bed the night before Father's Day, and in the morning, I couldn't wake her up.
“She then had a rush to hospital, where she started seizing. And then they put her on a ventilator, where she stayed on for a week before she was then transferred to Royal London Hospital, where the condition was diagnosed from there.”
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Initially, doctors thought Claire must have had a bleed to the brain, but this was ruled out after further tests.
It turned out she actually had encephalitis, an uncommon and serious condition in which brain becomes inflamed, which can be life threatening without urgent treatment.
It wasn’t until two weeks after being taken to Royal London Hospital that she came round, soon realising that her memory had gone.
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Claire, from Braintree in Essex, said: “I wasn't in the best space, I was hallucinating, quite delusional at that stage - which is quite normal if you've been on a ventilator.
“I mean, you’ve got to laugh about it now but I told anyone that would listen that Phil Collins was my cousin... Obviously he isn’t.”
Claire added: “I thought there was wasps in the ceiling or flies were getting in my ears. It was quite strange.”
The mum-of-two found she could remember family’s faces, but some of her key life events had completely faded from her memory.
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“I can't remember how he proposed, getting married, falling pregnant, having the birth of my children, any holidays with friends or anything like that,” she said.
“It's kind of all or gone.
“Same with events like 9/11. Scott had to tell me we had this Covid lockdown - luckily, I forgot all about homeschooling! I don't think I would have enjoyed that. But yeah, it's all gone.”
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She added: “It's horrible, I'm not gonna lie. I mean, you get people constantly saying to you, ‘Do you remember when...?’
“And I think now people remember not to say that to me, because it's sad. I can see that it was me in the photo, but I don't remember being there.”
Claire said experts have told her that if she was going to get her memory back it probably should have happened by now, but that sometimes she’ll ‘get a little ping’ and remember something.
She continued: “My short term memory is very scatty. I'm constantly relying on lists.
“I get very strange symptoms, like my senses will all go into override. I remember when I first got out of hospital we used to joke that I could be a sniffer dog in Calais, because I could literally smell my medicine from the other side of the room.
"But apart from that, yeah, it's just odd bits and pieces.”
Thankfully, Claire has just been able to start working as a journalist again – joking that as she still can’t drive she’s having to rely on Scott as her ‘chauffeur’.
According to the NHS, encephalitis sometimes starts off with ‘flu-like symptoms’ such as a high temperature and a headache.
More serious symptoms then come on over ‘hours, days or week’, including confusion or disorientation, seizure or fits, changes in personality and behaviour, difficulty speaking, weakness or loss of movement in some parts of the body and loss of consciousness.
Jess Hardiman