Survivor’s Jeff Probst Admits He Had a Terrifying Bout of Amnesia: "I Had No Idea Who I Was"
Survivor host Jeff Probst experienced a scary bout of transient global amnesia.
He opened up about the incident in a recent interview, explaining he had "zero recollection of anything that was happening to me."
Jeff Probst is okay now, but he recently battled a pretty terrifying health scare.
The longtime Survivor host, 58, stopped by LIVE With Kelly and Ryan in February, and explained that he lost his memory while he was booking travel for himself and his wife, Lisa Ann Russell, a few months back. He told Ryan Seacrest and Kelly Ripa that when it got to the prompt for him to fill out his wife’s birthday, he couldn’t remember what the date was. So, he asked Lisa to call him.
"I don’t really know what’s happening, I don’t know anything," he recalled telling her. "Like, where are the kids? She said, 'They’re at school.' And I said, 'Where are you?' And she said, ‘I’m at work!" He eventually told, her "Something's wrong."
Then, it got worse.
"What happened over the next hour and a half or two hours is that I had zero recollection of anything that was happening to me," he explained. "I had no idea who I was, where I was. I even wrote a note on my laptop that said, 'For our records: I have no idea why I’m wearing these clothes, I have no idea where our kids are, I have no idea what day it is, I have no idea why I’m writing this.’ And then a little later I type, 'I just read this, have no memory of writing it.'"
Thankfully, Jeff went to see a neurosurgeon the next morning who was able to diagnose what happened to the TV star.
"For three hours I had absolutely no memory," he said. "Don’t know what I did during those three hours, and he said it’s called transient global amnesia, TGA. It's just what happens, you lose your memory."
Mayo Clinic describes TGA as a "temporary episode of memory loss" where "your recall of recent events simply vanishes, so you can't remember where you are or how you got there." It often affects those of middle or older age, and "isn't serious, but it can still be frightening."
We hope Jeff feels better!
You Might Also Like
