On April 10, 2025, several hours after finishing a hike in Sedona, Arizona, Jan Anderson started repeating herself.
“Did we hike this morning?” she asked.
“Yes, we hiked,” said her husband, Steve Francks. “And you did really well.”
But 15 seconds later, she asked the same question: “Did we hike today?”
Anderson, 65, a retired finance executive, doesn’t remember any of it. She can recall what happened that afternoon only because her husband started recording her on his cellphone.
“I was just on this nonstop loop,” she said.
Almost immediately, Francks knew something was wrong. “Jan was out of it,” he said.
He took her to an emergency room in Sedona, where staff initially thought she might be having a stroke. Because the facility wasn’t fully equipped to evaluate or treat stroke patients, Francks said, she was airlifted to a Phoenix-area hospital, where she was admitted.
It turned out she wasn’t having a stroke. Her medical team eventually determined she was probably experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare, temporary, and benign memory disorder.
The good news was that her symptoms didn’t last long, and she has suffered no long-term effects from the episode. It took about 24 hours before she was able to start forming new memories, and she was discharged the next day. Anderson and F …