Two weeks, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Katie Couric “bought some beautiful peaches and nectarines, a big bag of kettle corn and a cute straw hat I really didn’t need.”
It was, as she wrote in a Substack post Wednesday, the last thing she remembers from that day. Couric would appear on a couple of panels at the event, though ““I have no idea what we talked about or of what occurred when the panels ended,” she wrote.
Afterward, she recalls feeling dizzy and weak, causing her husband John Molner to take her to hospital, where doctors and nurses quizzed her: “I wasn’t sure of the month. I thought it was 2024. And I believed Joe Biden was president,” she wrote, adding that she didn’t even remember that she had a newborn granddaughter named Virginia.
The hospital initiated a stroke protocol, Molner recalls in the blog post, adding that Couric reintroduced herself to the hospital staff whenever they entered the room. Ultimately, an MRI ruled out a stroke, and the doctors revealed their diagnosis: Transient global amnesia, a temporary lapse of memory, most common in middle age or older people.
“The cause seems to be as mysterious as the brain itself,” she wrote. “Someone described it as my brain failing to hit the record button.”
