On a balmy August morning of 1996, Colby College graduate Frank Favaloro was preparing for one of those days that marks a turning point in any student's life.
With a Ryder van parked in front of his parents' Norfolk, Mass., home, Favaloro was moments away from embarking on a new academic adventure at the University of Pennsylvania.
But then something went wrong. While attempting to lower a twin-sized futon mattress from his attic, Favaloro somehow lost his balance, fell down a flight of stairs and lost consciousness.
After that fateful day in August, Favaloro's future would be forever altered. Instead of following the path to Philadelphia, he is now a second-year graduate student of organic chemistry at Dartmouth.
A lapse in time
After the accident, the next thing Favaloro remembered was waking up in a hospital room with a splitting headache.
Only a few hours had passed since the accident, but he was already in a completely different world.
As the bright summer sun poured in the window, Favaloro became disoriented. He wondered why the sun would be so strong in November.
After fully waking, a confused Favaloro was tested by a doctor with a set of questions designed to determine a patient's level of consciousness. After he answered that the date was around Thanksgiving, the doctor simply replied, "Uh huh," and left the room.
Favaloro was convinced it was late November 1995 and he was home from college for Thanksgiving break. It was actually late August 1996.
It wasn't until a nurse told him the actual date that Favaloro realized something was very wrong.
This meant that he could not remember events such as his college graduation, his 22nd birthday or his acceptance to Penn -- the first indicators of retrograde amnesia.
When his parents arrived at the hospital, a thoroughly disoriented Favaloro began trying to make sense of this baffling information.
"Dad, I'm 21," he said. "What are they trying to tell me?"
At first it was difficult for his parents to understand that their son really could not recall any events from the last nine months of his life.
His father began recounting what he knew about his son's senior year at Colby and the summer he spent working there after graduation.
When his father informed him that today was the day he was supposed to be driving down to Philadelphia to begin graduate school, Favaloro was stunned.
"Penn? Why the hell would I want to go to Penn? It's in Philadelphia!" he responded.
His father took it easy on him, though, and only gave Favaloro a rough outline of the last nine months of his life so as not to overwhelm him.
When his parents got ready to leave the hospital for the night, his dad handed him his glasses, which had fallen off during the accident. Favaloro looked at the spectacles and asked, "Whose are these?"
Building a memory
After he was released from the hospital the next day, Favaloro walked outside and was still surprised to encounter the hot August sun.
But more surprises awaited him in the next week. When he arrived home, he had the strange feeling that someone had been in his bedroom and rearranged everything.
Among his collection of Disney movies -- which he has been accumulating for several years -- were movies he knew hadn't yet been released. His mother joked that he could have his whole Christmas over again.
As a self-described "control freak," Favaloro spent the next week contacting as many people as possible to find out all he could about his recent past. Though he remembered starting senior year, his memory stopped around the time of Thanksgiving.
Talking to friends from school was especially difficult. It was hard for them to comprehend that Favaloro really could not remember all of the events that they had shared so recently. It was also hard for friends to know what events Favaloro would want to know about most.
"You wake up and you've got people telling you it's nine months later than it is," Favaloro said. "You don't keep a checklist of things to tell a person when this happens."
His two best friends, his roommates senior year, contemplated playing some jokes on Favaloro once they found out about the accident.
"My first reaction was I wanted to make up some great stories about drunken orgies, but he'd never believe it," Kevin Hausmann said.
But Casey McCullough offered some more helpful feedback.
"I just wanted him to concentrate on current topics. We talked about stuff going on presently instead of dwelling on what he didn't remember," McCullough said.
For Favaloro, there was a desperate desire to build up a specific list of events that had shaped his recent life.
"You have no idea of how smart or stupid you have been ... is there a girlfriend that's pissed off because you haven't called her in a few days?" he said.
Favaloro later found out through McCullough and Hausmann that he had had three relationships throughout senior year, none of which he remembered.
Returning to Colby
At his doctor's recommendation, Favaloro decided to return to Colby in order to try to stimulate memory triggers at the familiar campus. Admissions officers at Penn told Favaloro to defer his admission for a year to give him time to recover his memory.
Favaloro quickly agreed to the plan, as he felt "cheated" out of his senior year and was also having doubts about attending Penn.
As a native of suburban Massachusetts and a graduate of Colby in rural Maine, Favaloro could not understand why he had wanted to go to the urban mecca of Philadelphia for the next five or more years of his life.
At the end of his senior year he had applied to Penn, the University of California at Irvine and Dartmouth.
The chemistry professor he had worked with at Colby helped him secure a position at Penn, a school he did not know very well but decided would be a good career choice. He never heard back from Dartmouth.
But after the accident, Favaloro had doubts about the decision he did not remember making.
"I didn't think that going to Philadelphia was the best idea," he said. "It's fantastic for anyone's career to go there, but it's not the kind of environment I wanted to be in."
Instead, Favaloro left for Colby, where he got two jobs, one in the admissions office and another in the chemistry department -- working with his former professor.
His doctor at home had told him that he could expect his memory to return after two months, but a psychology professor at Colby told him that it could take up to 10 months.
"When it comes down to it, we don't know much about the brain," Favaloro said.
But talking with the professor helped Favaloro, and reminded him that his situation could have been much worse.
The professor told him of football players who had sustained such severe head injuries that they could not remember anything they had read. Others were incapable of forming new memories.
"I kept thinking, 'it's only temporary and it could be worse,'" Favaloro said.
Being back at Colby was not always easy. On Colby's homecoming weekend -- when many of Favaloro's friends returned to campus -- a girl approached him whom he thought he did not know, but who turned out to be a girlfriend he had met, dated and broken up with during senior year.
After he told her about the accident, she was quickly able to understand and responded, "Oh hi, my name's Catherine."
Normal days
Favaloro's life began returning to normal during a biology lecture he was attending as a teacher's assistant in mid-October.
While staring off into space, Favaloro was suddenly hit by the thought that his friend Melanie's favorite ice cream flavor was mint chocolate chip. After class he confirmed this tidbit, which was something he had learned within the nine month period of senior year.
"I was told that if I aggressively pursued these memories, they would not come back," he said. "I just had to relax sometimes."
Over the next few months, more memories of his senior year began to return.
Though Favaloro could now remember most of what had been previously lost to amnesia, he still did not know where he wanted to attend graduate school.
Remembering that he had never heard back from Dartmouth, Favaloro decided to pursue things with the admissions department to find out what happened to his application.
After calling in the spring of 1997, he discovered that he never received an invitation to visit the campus the previous year due to a hitch in the mail.
Favaloro jumped at the chance and discovered a department he could easily fit into. He notified Penn that he would no longer attend, and instead began at Dartmouth in the fall of 1997.
Reflecting on the entire ordeal, Favaloro is thankful for the role that fate played in his eventual decision to attend Dartmouth, where he is now researching biologically active compounds under Dr. Gordon Gribble, Dr. Michael Sporn and Dr. Taoashi Honda.
He also reflected on what he has learned from his rare case of amnesia.
"The things you think can't be taken away from you, can," he said, adding that every memory and every event should never be taken for granted.
"What is possibly just your normal, average day is really, really important," he said.
