Doctors left stumped after father-of-three loses five years of memories overnight
A father-of-three woke up one day and found out that his memories of the preceding five years had vanished overnight. He was not aware when he woke up that he had a wife and children.
40-year-old Adam Gonzales has perplexed doctors after he forgot his wife Raquel and their three children. Magically, he was able to recover a few years of lost memories after three months.
Adam met his wife met in December 2012 and fell in love. They got married on July 7, 2015 in a ceremony in Gilbert, Arizona.
Early one morning in September the following year, however, Raquel walked into the living room of their home and found Adam looking very puzzled. He looked like he had no idea who she was.
Raquel said in an interview: "I asked him: 'Do you know where you are? Do you know what year this is? Do you know what my name is?' and he said 'No' to all these things."
She then tried to calm him down and she told him that she was his wife and that they had three children together. Adam reportedly burst into tears when he heard this. Without hesitating even for a moment, she told her confused husband to get ready and told him that they had to go to the hospital at once.
Adam wanted to wear his suits and was confused when he couldn't find any. Raquel told him that he did not have any suits because he was a personal trainer.
Adam was pretty reluctant at first when a woman who he thought was a stranger took him to a hospital. Thus began the long ride of MRIs, CAT scans, ecocardiograms, and other tests. The problem with this was that all the tests in the world could not find out what was wrong with Adam and why he had lost his memory.
Then, on December 2016, Adam miraculously woke up and remembered bits of the five years that he had lost. He remembered that he had a wife named Raquel. The funny part is that he started apologising to her for something that happened to the two of them three years before. The memory that Adam was apologising for happened at a time when they were still dating.
Raquel confirmed that the memories that her husband was apologising to her for happened much earlier on in their relationship. The memory was at a time when their three children were still young. At one point, Raquel said, Adam went to check if his daughter was getting ready to go to school and then he realised that she was a lot older than he remembered.
The father had to be given directions to the children's schools while he was dropping them off. He even told them to put the address of their family home on the GPS so that he wouldn't get lost on his way back home.
He is on the way to recovery but it will take some time. So far he has regained two years worth of his memory but three years are still missing. The important memories like his wedding to Raquel are still missing.
The family wrote on their GoFundMe page: "Adam is now home, with his wife and family, but has no recollection of 2012 - 2016. This includes his wedding day, daddy-daughter dances, vacations, baptisms, and other key events, along with his career as a personal trainer. Adam and Raquel are beginning to date and rebuild their “new” lives together but the road ahead will be long and full of challenges for the whole family, which includes 3 amazing teenagers."
Adam is no stranger to memory loss as this wasn't the first time something like this has happened to him. When his first marriage fell through, he started dating a woman who turned out to be a devil in disguise. She used to abuse him endlessly and ultimately tried to strangle him to death with an electric cord. She mercilessly left him for dead in his garage.
As the paramedics were rushing the man to the hospital for emergency treatment, his heart stopped three times. He was also in a coma for four months while he was in the hospital. The incident took place before he met Raquel, in 2011.
The man was a branch manager for telecoms giant AT&T before the abusive relationship. He was also a devout church leader in Lubbock, Texas, but unfortunately, Adam doesn't remember any of that.
Adam told the BBC that he had no recollection of his wife and his two children from his first marriage. He also said that he had no memory that he had been married before and then divorced before meeting Raquel. The man spent a year in the hospital after waking up from his coma just figuring out how to walk and even talk again.
He was only introduced to his son and daughter after a few months of therapy. He said: "How could a father, a dad, forget his biological children?" He did not go back to his job of branch manager because he was afraid that he would not be able to "live up to this person" whom he had no memory of being. He then moved to Phoenix, Arizona, with his two kids and became a personal trainer.
It was here that he met Raquel in 2012. After just a few short months of dating, Adam, and his son and daughter, and Raquel, and her daughter, moved into a home together. Their lives changed drastically when he had his second memory loss in September 2016. Adam could not remember who Raquel or the three children - 12-year-old Abby, 15-year-old Lulu, and 17-year-old Elijah - were.
He was skeptical about Raquel in the beginning but then trusted his mother who told him: "She loves you. You have my blessing."
The couple started dating again and getting to know each other from scratch at the hospital. They would meet in secluded spots and talk about their lives over grilled cheese sandwiches at the hospital cafeteria.
Raquel said: "In the hospital, Adam would turn to me saying: 'If you're my wife, I think we can kiss. This is still the husband I married — he is always trying to get a free kiss. Adam's always been a flirt and continues to be a flirt. Those were little rays of hope saying: 'This is still the man that you married — he just can't remember what year'."
Her husband is regaining his memories slowly and the two of them continue to work on their relationship. Raquel has been Adam's rock through the entire thing and added, at the end: "My whole life completely changed and it was a beautiful disaster."