The missing years

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

There’s this new show on TV called “Doc.” I’m not sure it it’s going to make it into our list of shows that my wife and I watch together, but it came on after a football game the other day and we were already sitting there on the couch (and someone had set the remote on a table that was not accessible from where we were comfortably seated), so we ended up watching the first episode (because neither of us was willing to get up and walk the five feet it would have taken to get the remote).

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything since all of the commercials I’ve seen for the show give away this information as the premise of the show, but “Doc” is about a doctor who gets into a car crash on the way home from the hospital, hits her head and loses eight years’ worth of memories, meaning, since the show’s first episode takes place in 2024, she wakes up from her

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crash-induced unconsciousness thinking it’s sometime in the year 2016.

We learn this when her doctor is asking her all the standard “How’s your mental state?” questions and she thinks Barack Obama is still president. Boy, is she in for some surprises, right?

I won’t give away any more of the plot points, other than to say that a lot of things in her life have changed since 2016, and not all of them for the better. But it did make me start thinking about what it might be like if you suddenly lost eight years of memories.

Personally, both of my sons got married almost five years ago. My grandson didn’t exist yet. I would be under the belief that my now-college freshman daughter was still just 10 years old.

And that’s just the individual, personal-level stuff. Imagine all the major world events and even smaller stuff, like the rise of AI and Chat GPT, the bog sporting events and movies you would have forgotten.

Wiped away would be memories of the whole COVID-19 pandemic, the entire Donald Trump presidency (now the first one, I guess), and stuff like wars and protests and the deaths of several celebrities (and possibly the deaths of some of your loved ones whose last moments yo spent together were now forgotten.

It’s a pretty scary premise, and I’m glad it’s just a show…