Lost Time

Have I been abducted by aliens? This is a common explanation by those who believe in UFO abductions to explain the phenomena of lost or missing time, in which one realizes that they can not account for a period of time. It seems to be missing.

I have experienced this, sometimes frequently. I would sit at my desk in my home office trying to work, and I would look up at the clock a few moments later and a couple of hours had passed. I would go for a short walk around the nearby college campus, one that would normally take twenty minutes or so, and I would get home several hours later.

What happened? Where did I go? I was astonished by the passage of time that I had no recollection of.

I will say that these incidents have almost completely ceased since going on Savella. I still get the common fibromyalgia symptom of going away. It is generally referred to as staring into space before the brain "kicks in". I may be standing in a store and just go away mentally. My wife has to say “Jeff, come back.”, which usually snaps me out of it. I don't know where I go. It just feels like I go away with no memory of that time.

I am usually aware of this, and sort of snap myself back even when my wife is not around. But perhaps before the Savella, this happened for much longer periods of time. Still, I was out amongst people, and you'd think someone might see a frozen person and say something, which would have snapped me out of it. I have no recollection of ever snapping back. The time is just completely gone.

I have found nothing specific in the literature about this longer term time loss. Could it be more of a short term memory loss, something that is known to be a problem with FM? Could I just have forgotten doing things and be unaware of it? I don't know.

I have experienced short term memory loss before the fibromyalgia. After my pericarditis I apparently had some brain damage from not getting enough blood to the brain. I did not forget my past but had difficulty storing new memories. Whatever happened a few hours previous was lost. Reading a book was impossible because when I picked it up again I had no memory of what I had read before.

When I was able to walk from the living room back to the bedroom unassisted, I would stop and stare in the full length hallway mirror. My wife would get me and steer me the rest of the way to bed. As an actor, I thought it would be useful for me to know what I looked like when I was really sick in case I ever needed to recreate that in a performance, so I stared and stared into the mirror. Of course, I never remembered that I had done the same thing many times before, or that later I would forget that I had done it again.

I feared that my ability to remember might never come back. I did not remember how long it had been going on, or how long I had been sick. As usually happens in these cases, my ability to remember slowly came back.

In an interesting aside, as much as I enjoyed the movie 50 First Dates, the condition described for Drew Barrymore's character as Goldfield's Syndrome was made up. There had been no cases where people only retain a day at a time. At least that was the case until 2010. A woman exhibited symptoms after an accident almost identical to those in the movie. They eventually found a solution for her, by having her sleep only 3.5 hours at a time. She was then able to maintain her memories. The character Ten Second Tom did reflect an actual condition, though.

As you might guess, I don't buy the alien abduction hypothesis. Missing or lost time is often reported by those suffering from multiple personality disorder, but I really think my wife might have noticed that. Alcohol can cause a blackout where you have no memory of what happened, but I don't drink. A fugue state can involve memory loss of what happened during the fugue. Dissociative fugue is defined as: “one or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one's past along with either the loss of one's identity or the formation of a new identity which occurs with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home.” Kind of fits, but a little extreme. Unfortunately I have no idea what I was doing during the lost time. I doubt I assumed another personality while sitting at my desk. If I did, it was a lazy personality because he got no work done.

Many reports of lost time are dismissed as people who simply lose track of time. That was not the case with me, since when I was at my desk nothing was done during the period of time I missed. I got no work done at all. My memory of my walks were of a fixed distance that I knew well how long it took to walk.

I thought a little research would turn up more on this, but I have found little so far. For now, I'll just add it to the list of strange symptoms I have experienced.