STARTLING REALITY

The idea of waking up one day and suddenly missing 20 years of your life seems like the plot of a movie, but for 35-year-old Granbury resident Daniel Porter, it was a startling reality.

On July 13, 2020, Daniel woke up in an unfamiliar room with a woman he had no recollection of ever meeting — that woman being his wife.

“He just woke up and he was missing 20 years,” said Daniel’s wife, Ruth. “I could tell he didn’t know where he was. He was trying to figure it out and he looked completely shocked when he saw me next to him. I started talking to him. I was like, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He said ‘No.’ I said ‘I’m your wife.’

He looked at his hands, but he had taken his ring off during the night, so it wasn’t on his hand.

“He thought that I kidnapped him, because in his mind he was about to get ready for his freshman year in high school. His first thought process was ‘maybe I met some woman and went home with her.”’

Recently, Daniel started having seizures, which always took place during the night when he was sleeping. Ruth was used to Daniel waking up with a seizure and said that normally, it takes him a small amount of time to rebalance. That morning, she thought Daniel was recuperating from a seizure.

“I talked to a friend (of Daniel). He said sometimes he won’t remember where he was,” Ruth explained. “He looked in the mirror and he was mad. He said ‘Why am I old? Why am I fat?’ He was furious and I’m thinking that in 30 minutes, everything is going to come back to him.”

But after 30 minutes, Daniel’s memory still wasn’t coming back.

They visited Daniel’s parents, who lived next door, and they confirmed to him that Ruth was Daniel’s wife.

Ruth was advised to take Daniel to the emergency room if his memory still had not returned in a couple of hours.

“As I was taking him to the emergency room, he was freaking out over gas prices. He did not understand how anybody could drive with them being as high as they are. They were like 90 cents a gallon the last time he remembered,” Ruth said. “If you’re coming from 1999 era and then being thrown into 2020 with coronavirus, it’s bizarre. We get there and he’s looking at all of the bullet proof glass. He thinks people are crazy now and they’ve been shooting at the hospital.”

Daniel didn’t even know the name of the current U.S. president.

“The news came on while we were in the emergency room and he said, ‘Who’s Donald Trump?’ He had no idea who the guy was. I said, ‘Did you ever see Home Alone 2?’” she said, with a laugh.

DIAGNOSIS

After running many tests, doctors determined that Daniel had transient global amnesia, a sudden, temporary episode of memory loss that can last anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours.

However, after 24 hours had passed, Daniel had yet to regain any memory past the age of 15.

“We went back to his neurologist and they said, ‘Well it comes back or it doesn’t,’ and that’s where they left us,” Ruth said.

Daniel was finally diagnosed with retrograde amnesia, which is the loss of past memories, and non-epileptic seizures. He has never had a head injury and otherwise, tests determined that he is a perfectly healthy 35-yearold.

“To our best knowledge, he’s missing 20 years. Nothing has come back yet. They told us he should get his education back, because most people do, but he hasn’t gotten any of that back,” Ruth said.

Daniel had been working as a hearing specialist for 10 years, but now he doesn’t have the knowledge he needs to continue his career.

He has no memories of Ruth or their 9-year-old daughter, Libby.

“He doesn’t remember meeting me or getting married. I was completely erased so it’s really bizarre. He thought I was cute, so he wanted to try it out,” she said, giggling. “The second day, I said, ‘If you don’t think I’m cute, I really don’t want to waste my time on this.’ He was like, ‘No, let’s just see how this goes.”

Ruth searched Facebook to see if she could find anyone who might’ve experienced the same issues as her husband.

She found a retrograde amnesia Facebook group that was created eight years ago and only had 80 members.

“These are people who had head injuries or who slipped and fell at work,” she said. “There were two other people that had a similar situation who woke up and they were missing their whole life or a large chunk of it.

“One lady never regained her memory. She went back to college. There’s a bestselling author. He wrote a book called ‘My Life Deleted.’ I think he’s missing 10 years. I don’t believe he got any of that back.

“There was also a little girl who had woke up and she was missing her whole childhood. I believe she was 12, but she regained most of her memories, but the time between when she lost her memory and gained it back was erased.”

CULTURE SHOCK

Ruth gave Daniel his iPhone, which naturally was a shocking experience for him.

“When I gave him his phone, he said, ‘I had a phone?’ ... They had the Nokia phones back in the 90s, so him coming to 2020 with an iPhone was a surprise,” she said. “I told him if there’s anything he needs to know, if I’m not around, just go ask Google. I showed him YouTube, so he’s been able to figure out most everything that he needs to do from there.”

Ruth said the most bizarre experience of Daniel’s memory loss was trying to teach him how to shave again.

“He’s weirded out that he has body hair that he has to take care of,” she said. “I didn’t think about that level of complication.

“The other interesting thing is just how much the world has changed in 20 years. He doesn’t remember Y2K, 9/11 or any of that. In the ER the news was on BLM, the riots, defunding police, cancel culture, coronavirus plus election year. He was in culture shock, big time.”

CREATING NEW MEMORIES

Daniel is currently homeschooling Libby until he figures out what career he wants to pursue.

“He didn’t enjoy the hearing aid-type job he was doing and he did it for 10 years, but he has no interest in it, so I think we’re going to experiment and figure out what he wants to do with his life and go from there,” Ruth said. “It’s unfair to ask someone who just woke up in 2020 and was a kid a couple of months ago to be a fullgrown adult with responsibility right now.”

Ruth said they are always trying to stay positive throughout this new experience and are looking toward the future.

“I still wake up every day like, ‘how is this my life?”’ she said. “It feels normal now, so my outlook has changed because I believe anything is possible now; there are no limits.”

As for Daniel’s memory, Ruth doesn’t believe it will ever come back.

“I don’t think a lot of doctors have ever experienced having to diagnose somebody with retrograde amnesia, especially without having any head trauma or a tumor,” she said. “Everyone feels sorry for us, but it’s really not that hard; it’s the part that he doesn’t remember — his education or what he did for a living. He’s still having seizures and there’s pain in his body. His memory, if that comes back or not, I’m okay with it, but I know for him it’s hard. He’s still living with a person he doesn’t know, but we’re going to have as much fun as we can creating new memories and that’s where we are. It can only go up from here.”

ashley@hcnews.com 817-573-1243