When Beki Propst went to bed in her Sterling apartment on Halloween night 1997, she had a job, an admirable resume, a black belt in karate, hobbies, friends, family. She had a 47-year-old life.
When she woke up the next day, everything was gone. Her family, her childhood, her name, her work experience, her history: all erased. A vicious electrical storm in her brain — a grand mal seizure — had wiped away her long-term memories. All of them.
She knew how to do things, such as read, write, talk and walk. She knew nothing about people, facts, names and history. She knew how to drive a car, but she knew nothing about the rules of the road.
She explains it this way: “My brain’s hard drive was erased, but the operating system was intact.”
Her father and sisters were strangers. Her college degree was worthless. She couldn’t even remember where she went to school. Her job experience — assistant director of governmental services for the Colorado Association of Realtors, owner of a small printing company, broadcast journalist with the National Guard — was meaningless.
Her passport was stamped with exotic destinations such as Bolivia and Tahiti, places she did not know. The toys in her closet — cross country and downhill skis, hunting guns, a bike, a karate uniform — were foreign objects. The photo albums on her bookshelf were filled with strangers, including a tall, athletic girl with long, blond hair: herself.
“I don’t even know who this man is,” she says, tossing her wedding album from a trunk she keeps in the bedroom of her modest Longmont apartment. “I don’t know the woman either. Why do I even keep this?”
Doctors call it transient epileptic amnesia. It is not unusual for seizures to leave cognitive function intact while disabling a sufferer’s ability to retrieve established memories, a condition known as “retrograde amnesia.”
“Memory for practical skills is stored in different brain regions from memories for autobiographical events . . . hence the possibility of losing one kind but not the other,” said Dr. Adam Zeman, a neurology professor with the United Kingdom’s Peninsula Medical School who has researched epileptic amnesia but has never met Propst.
What is rare is losing all autobiographical memory.
Zeman said in most cases of epileptic amnesia he has studied, a prolonged series of seizures over time is responsible for typically patchy loss of memories.
The warning signs
Looking back, Propst’s family now blames such seizures for the changes they saw in Beki during the 1990s.
That was the decade when Propst’s promising life began to unravel, culminating in the total eclipse of her past in 1997.
Her family thought she was a drunk. Her relationships with friends were frayed. Her third husband left her. Her mom died of ovarian cancer. She had radical surgery for breast cancer. And no one — including herself — knew she was enduring an endless stream of partial complex seizures that left her anxious, agitated, confrontational and unpredictable.
“At one point I wondered if she was bipolar because she could be so different,” said her sister, Lorre Propst McKeone, who lives in Nebraska and recalls dozens of phone calls with her sister that would often veer into eruptive abuse.
“She had burned some bridges with us from her behavior, but now I really think she was losing it in pieces — she was losing chunks of things — and we didn’t realize,” McKeone said.
There is a medical condition where memory loss like Propst’s is psychological. That suggestion was something she faced a lot as she tried to relearn everything and admitted to friends and colleagues she had lost her past.
One time a few years ago, she rented the movie “Fiddler on the Roof” with her sister, who took an hour to explain the history of the movie and the plight of Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s. Her sister was floored when Propst began singing along to the musical.
“It was confusing,” McKeone said. “She says she lost all these things, but how could she know songs?”
Propst cannot explain how she remembers lyrics but not her own family.
“The brain is a crazy thing,” she said.
“In such circumstances, one always has to be alert to the possibility of psychogenic or functional amnesia,” Zeman said. “The block is in some sense psychological rather than neurological and can be reversed.”
Propst dismisses the notion that she has “blocked” her past. Her simple reply: “Who would want to do that?”
Dr. David Ewing, a neurologist with Centennial Neurology in Greeley, has been seeing Propst since 1997. In his career, he has seen only one other person lose such large chunks of memory from epileptic seizures. That patient — a successful woman in car sales — was suspected by her doctors to be faking, but further testing revealed otherwise.
He would be interested in conducting similar high-level tests on Propst — brain scans that go well beyond routine MRI and CT scans. But the insurance her janitor job provides is not the type that would support such tests, Ewing said.
“She’s doing pretty menial work right now,” Ewing said. “She’s come a long way down from where she used to fly. But she’s done the best she can with it. I’d say at this point her memory loss is probably permanent simply because it has been 10 years and it hasn’t come back.”
“I just explored everything”
Following the diagnosis of her memory-eclipsing 1997 grand mal seizure, she struggled to realize the importance of what she lost.
She considers herself an 11-year-old in a 57-year-old’s body. Medication, specifically Lamictal, which was released in early 1997, has kept her seizure-free and ended the electrical bursts that had racked her brain for most of the ’90s.
For those first few years of her new life, Propst saw everything as a grand adventure, filled with risk and excitement. She lived like a child, brimming with curiosity. Stopping on long hikes through prairies around her Sterling apartment, she would stare at an ant mound for a couple of hours.
“I didn’t really care about my past. I didn’t know what a normal memory was. I just explored everything. Everywhere I went was the most amazing place,” she said. “One day I sat down with my dad — he used to be a history teacher — and over four hours he related the history of the world. That was the most fascinating day of my life.”
Back in her Longmont apartment recently, Propst is rifling through the trunk next to her king-size water bed.
Two well-worn stuffed animals are on top.
“My sister says my mom made these for me, and I loved them,” she says.
Other remnants of an unknown past are there: A photo of her finishing the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C. A folder labeled “Hunter Education,” from her days as an instructor for hunter safety. A marriage license. Divorce papers. Transcripts from colleges in Michigan, Florida and northeastern Colorado.
“I do not know any of this stuff. It’s like it’s someone else’s,” she says, cramming it all back in the trunk and carefully arranging her alarm clock and reading light on top.
Appreciating the present
For her family, her lack of nostalgia strained the rebuilding process.
“She would get really impatient with us. We’d get out our scrapbooks and show her our history with her and she would listen politely, and then she would say, ‘Who cares? I don’t know this person,’ ” McKeone said. “We eventually realized we were doing it for ourselves, and I basically had to accept that this was a new person. It was interesting, getting reacquainted with a person who acts like, looks like a person you know really well but is not that person. For her, I was this new person who for some reason just kept hanging out in her life. Now I feel like I’ve got back the sister I knew when I was young. ”
Propst’s early fascination with life soon gave way to terror. She spun through a few jobs, losing them, she thinks, because of her childlike understanding of social interaction. She lived in near-paralyzing fear that she would end up destitute and homeless.
“You were sure you were going to be a bag lady,” said her pal, Jim Miller, who met her 10 years ago, shortly after that last seizure, and has proved to be her most trusted friend. “You would call me in such a panic.”
She’s tried to run her own cleaning business, but the sporadic flow of work was frustrating. She’s adept at financial stuff and computers but still fights to understand the complexities of working with other personalities.
Today she has found some stability, working as a custodian at the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District facility in Berthoud. She’s written a book, “Absent Memories: Moving forward when you can’t look back,” and has begun booking speaking engagements where she tells her story and urges listeners to embrace each memory — good and bad — because they are the anchors of a rich life.
“A lot of people believe that if you don’t have any memory, you are retarded, and I want to change that,” she said, her blue eyes blazing. “I think I appreciate life probably more than other people. I don’t think you should live in the past. You should appreciate every moment of the present. And the future.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com
Learn more about Propst at her website, .
