Hey Internet: Can You Help Figure Out Who This Woman With Amnesia Is?
The woman, named “Sam,” was also treated for ovarian cancer after she was found in California. (Photo: Facebook)
The FBI and Australian officials are asking for help in identifying a woman called “Sam” with amnesia who was found in Carlsbad, California, in February, according to news reports.
The woman is white, approximately 50 years old, is five feet and seven inches tall, weighs 200 pounds, has blonde highlighted hair, has brown eyes, has an Australian accent, and speaks English and French. She also has a small pox scar on her right arm, and is near-sighted.
A Facebook page, titled “Found White Woman With Amnesia - Help Find Her Family,” has even been set up in efforts to identify her and find her family; the page already has 11,000 likes. Interpol has also set up a page seeking help in identifying her.
There is extremely little known about the woman, though in posts she presumably wrote on the Facebook page, there is some potential indication of places she may have traveled to in the past. “All of my initial dreams had to do with a lap pool swimming in a salt water pool in Perth, then Icebergs in New South Wales and in Cairns in Queensland and Byron Bay,” according to the “About” section of the Facebook page.
According to news reports, she has also undergone treatment for ovarian cancer since being discovered. NBC New York reported that Sam has stage 3 ovarian cancer. The Facebook page’s “About” section also notes that in addition to having the tumor surgically removed from her body, she also had to have her cervix, uterus, and fallopian tubes removed.
Yahoo Health reached out to the administrator of the Facebook page for more information regarding Sam’s reported amnesia-cancer link, but was given the response “Sorry not at this time thank you …”
According to the Facebook page’s “About” section:
The amnesia I have is called retro amnesia and doctors have seen this before with the kind of antibodies that were found on the volleyball sized tumor that was on my ovary. The doctors said it could have been growing for 5 years causing me to be forgetful of things.
Retrograde amnesia is the term referring to loss of memory or information that was acquired by a person before the onset of amnesia, according to a 1998 Journal of Neuroscience study. “The condition is commonly observed after medial temporal lobe or diencephalic pathology, and it has fascinated psychologists, biologists, and clinicians for over 100 years.”
“With respect to what kind of memory impairment occurs, RA sometimes has been described as affecting both fact (semantic) memory and autobiographical (episodic) memory similarly,” the study says. “Alternatively, RA has been described as affecting autobiographical memory across a patient’s entire lifetime and affecting fact memory to a much lesser degree.”
While there’s little evidence showing a link between ovarian cancer and amnesia, it is known that tumors in the brain — particularly in regions controlling memory — can lead to amnesia. A 2006 case study published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine also details a case of an 82-year-old woman who developed retrograde amnesia due to a tumor in her brain.
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