A woman who couldn't remember ten years of her life after falling into a coma has spoken of the moment she woke up - and saw her family had seemingly aged overnight.
Alisha Gerrard, 34, nearly died after she suffered complications from a medication she was prescribed for arthritis in February 2021. But when she woke up around a month later, she had forgotten a decade of her life - including her seven-year marriage to husband Philip, and the death of her nan.
Unable to ask questions due to a tracheostomy tube in her neck, Alisha said nobody knew she couldn't remember anything until the tube was removed. She then spent months coming to terms with rediscovering her own twenties, she told the Liverpool Echo.
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She said: "I couldn't speak or ask questions, so nobody knew that I didn't remember anything until they took the tube out. I remember my mum coming to see me at the hospital and saying 'your nan's been looking after you'. I thought she meant she had been visiting. It was only when she said she had been looking down on me that I realised she had died."
While coming to terms with her nan's death all over again, Alisha was further shocked to discover that she was married to a man she thought was just a good friend.
She said: "I don't remember my wedding day. When I came out of hospital I went to stay with my parents, because I felt familiar in their house. My first thought was that everyone looked so much older. There's 11 years between me and my brother, so I remembered him as being in high school, into football, and now he's got a girlfriend and a job and he drives. He's a grown man now.
"Because me and Phil were best friends anyway, I still knew who he was. He wasn't a total stranger. He came to see me and we had a big talk, and he kind of answered everything for me. He came to see me every day and he'd tell me things, and sometimes I would remember. He told me about when I was pregnant, and I remembered - I remembered losing the pregnancy. I don't remember the details, but I remember going for a scan, the feeling of jelly on my stomach and hearing the machines.
"The only way I can describe it is like when you have a dream, and you remember bits of your dream."
Phil said: "It was hard at first, especially having to come to terms with it when it first happened. But it's been a way of building up our relationship again.
"It has definitely brought us closer. We're taking it very slow and reminiscing about stuff from her past. We're also getting to experience things again together for the first time. There's dozens of movies and TV shows she gets to see again and experience. There's places she can see have changed since she last remembered them."
Having rekindled their relationship against all odds, the couple, who live in Clubmoor, have promised to recreate the magical wedding day which Alisha has forgotten. Phil proposed to Alisha for a second time on Valentine's Day, and the two plan to renew their vows on their tenth anniversary in December 2024.
Phil said: "I showed her past images, slowly introducing past parts of herself, but not too much to overwhelm her. It's a slow process, but it's also a learning process. Nothing easy is worth going for, you've got to put the work in and keep on trying. Especially as we've been together so long."
Alisha said: "I do feel like I'm still in my 20s sometimes. I say to people 'am I still the same person I was?'. A lot changes in 10 years, and I don't know who that girl is any more. Everyone says there are some things that have changed, but all it means is that I'm a stronger person. I have the rest of my life ahead of me, and that's what I couldn't be more thankful for."
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