PALM SPRINGS When Michael Boatwright woke up in the emergency room at Desert Regional Medical Center, the nurses began asking him questions for which it became clear he had no answers. The gray haired, soft spoken man looked at his identity card and didn't recognize his own face. He answered only to Johan Ek.
UPDATE: Michael Boatwright amnesia story makes Swedish tabloids (July 15)
Michael Boatwright found with amnesia in Palm Springs "The guy Michael it wasn't me. I'm still Johan," he said through a translator in a recent hospital interview, twisting his water bottle around in his hands.
What we know about Michael Boatwright, who woke up in Palm Springs with amnesia
The man was found unconscious in a Motel 6 room on Palm Canyon Drive at noon on Feb. 28, said Lisa Hunt Vasquez, the social worker assigned to track down next of kin information and help to piece Boatwright's story together.
He had with him a duffel bag of casual athletic clothes , a backpack, five tennis rackets, two cell phones, some cash, a set of old photos and four forms of identification: a passport, California identification card, veteran's medical card and a Social Security card. Each of them identified him as Michael Thomas Boatwright.
After police arrived at the motel, he was admitted to Desert Regional.
Hospital staff kept him in the acute floors for two to three weeks, conducting mental and physical health exams to determine what was wrong with him. On March 13 , a psychiatrist and psychologist diagnosed the patient with Transient Global Amnesia in a "fugue state," Hunt Vasquez said. The conditions were likely triggered by some kind of emotional or physical trauma.
Dissociative fugue is a mental disorder characterized by memory loss about a person's past, "sudden and unplanned travel," identity confusion and possible adoption of a new identity, according to a WebMD profile of the disorder. It is "relatively rare."
Transient Global Amnesia is a neurological phenomenon that causes people to "stop encoding new memories," said Dr. Richard Caselli, professor of neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.
They are both temporary conditions that leave people confused about their surroundings and "a pretty scary thing for patients," he said. But Transient Global Amnesia typically lasts hours. Such patients can also recall long term memories, but not new ones. The Mayo Clinic sees about 24 100 cases of it each year, he said.
It is "theoretically possible" the patient could have both coexisting or had both at the initial point of diagnosis, but Caselli does not know if that has ever occurred.
"Certainly one does not imply the other," he said. "It's not somebody that's got a psychiatric history that (Transient Global Amnesia) is more likely to happen to. I don't know what the vice versa would be."
He also did not rule out the possibility that this could be a different form.
"Is there something out there that is somehow physiologically similar and can last for months? There could be, but nothing I've ever heard of," he said.
Fugue state, however, can last up to months, the profile said.
The difficulty with the fugue state diagnosis, though , is that there is "a little more room for error there than the typical diagnosis," Caselli said.
"It's fair to say that whenever one is talking about disability from a psychiatric disorder and it's not one of the organic psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, I would imagine there's a lot of controversy about that," he said. "How do you tell if somebody's faking it or not faking it?"
Still, the dissociative fugue state is recognized in the diagnostic psychological manual and occurs occasionally.
Medical staff on his case at Desert Regional determined that with this diagnosis, and unable to speak the language or remember anything about his past , it would be unsafe to release Boatwright into the community. He was moved to the hospital's skilled nursing facility, where he remains until the medical team decides how to safely discharge him. Navy as an aviation mechanic. The VA had one emergency contact listed for Boatwright: a name, address and telephone number in Japan, but the social worker was unable to reach anyone there.
Boatwright had flown to Palm Springs from Hong Kong on Feb. 24, the day his Chinese visa expired, Hunt Vasquez said, but no one knows why he was in the region either. There are theories he had come for tennis, because of the rackets and the time he had arrived when many tournaments are held in the Coachella Valley. Leads were sent out to various tennis organizers. No one was able to track down a connection.
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