Since then John has found himself marooned in a strange nether-world. He can speak and write, but he can't understand what he is reading. A former football player, he now had no idea what a football was—but when handed a ball he was able to throw a perfect spiral. He didn't know what the word shower meant. "So I took him in there," says his mother, Donna, who along with her husband runs a firewood business in Midlothian, Texas, near Dallas, "and said, "This is the bar of soap; this is how you use it.' "After being reunited with the family's two dogs, he happened to spot a horse in a field nearby. "Whose big dog is that?" he asked his mother.
According to Charles Tuen, the neurologist treating John, such extensive forms of amnesia are rare when no real signs of trauma are noticeable. "Think of a big building where the telephone lines get all disconnected," says Tuen. In most cases the lines reconnect, which is what is expected to happen in John's case. "I just want to remember," he says. In fact, each day he's able to recall a bit more—but it still isn't much. Recently he went with two friends to seethe movie 50 First Dates, in which Drew Barrymore plays amnesia victim. Later his parents asked what he'd seen, "I can't remember, he said. "But it was about somebody who couldn't remember things." Somehow, that made him happy.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
