Stress and Amnesia: My Friend's Incredible Story {Guest Post}

I am so excited to have a friend of mine guest posting today! I met Shannon several years ago through our essential oil community – our personalities are similar in many ways and you can often find us strategizing about our oily businesses.

Last year Shannon posted on Facebook that her husband, David, was having some serious health issues that included unexplained amnesia. For almost a month I (and many others) followed their journey as they shared updates on Facebook and prayed for David’s memory to return.

*spoiler alert* It did!

David and Shannon have written a book about how amnesia changed their lives and the lessons they’ve learned along the way.

One of the lessons they learned was about stress and slowing down – I’ve watched them drastically transform their lives in this regard over the last year! When Shannon and I talked about her doing a guest post I wanted her to focus specifically on what they’d learned about stress and slowing down because I know that’s an area that many of us moms need to work on!

Now, take it away Shannon!

We are honored today to be featured on Caitlin’s blog! As a homeschool mom and essential oil enthusiast, I know we all have several things in common. 😊 I’ve always looked up to Caitlin and am amazed at how she juggles all the demands of life and shares so effortlessly (at least that’s how it appears!) about it all. I know her blog is a place of hope, ideas and answers for so many – we pray our story today will resonate in those same ways.

Amnesia rocked our world in the spring of 2019. Who even gets amnesia these days? Prior to our experience, I had only heard of amnesia in the context of movies; this was not your every-day trial. My husband, the pastor of our church, collapsed and became totally unresponsive one Sunday after church and I thought he was having a heart attack. It was one of the scariest moments of my life. But when we got him to the hospital and started running tests, his heart checked out perfectly! As he started to awaken, he became extremely confused, paranoid and restless…and we realized he had “awakened” about 10 years in the past. It was just like the movies in so many ways; it seemed as if he had been catapulted in a time capsule from 2009 to 2019 in an instant. So bizarre.

He thought our younger boys were still in car seats (they were 9 and 10 at the time). He didn’t know that he was a pastor and remembered nothing about our church. He didn’t recognize our home, our dog or friends and family that had come into our life within the past 10 years. He “woke up” to our family being gluten free and obsessed with essential oils and natural products. Nothing we did or said brought the memories back.

The doctors said his heart and brain were perfect and most likely this episode of severe amnesia was caused by years of cumulative stress. They didn’t know when or if his memories would return, so they told us to go home and just live our lives. That’s easier said than done when nothing about your current life is familiar. David’s brain was taking in new information every single second as he oriented to our “new” life.

We write about daily life with amnesia and the layers affected in our new book, “One Thing Remains: One Couple’s Traumatic Encounter with Amnesia and Their Life-Changing Journey to Restoration.” We’d love for you to grab a copy on Amazon to get the full scoop. We’ll give you a little spoiler alert! His memories DID return in a supernatural, miraculous way 26 days later. But the lessons we learned during and after amnesia have literally changed our life, and we are now passionate about sharing them with others.

One of those powerful lessons was that stress can be incredibly dangerous and we have to take intentional steps to reduce stress in our lives. Before amnesia, we were a super-busy family, and we took pride in our identity as a driven, type A, never-stop, do-it-all family. How wrong we were in our assumption of what truly mattered!

David was (and is) the pastor of a growing church. Church-life comes with its own unique and heavy stressors. We also had a homestead with many acres, chickens, organic garden and orchard, pond and fields. It was a value of ours to be self-sufficient, but it was too much. I run a busy home-based business, we homeschool our younger sons, and we are very involved with family and church-life. People close to us often commented that we were too busy, but we shrugged it off. David had warning signs that things weren’t right in his body, but once again, we ignored them and pressed on. Eventually the brain had taken enough and it shut down, we believe, as a protective mechanism. It was either shut down or explode…

While David had amnesia, we noticed something very peculiar. He was emotionally detached from the things he didn’t remember. Even though chickens and this homestead was his idea, when he didn’t remember them, he was disinterested in them. He looked at our life as if he was an outsider. He had this birds-eye view of our lifestyle, and he was motivated to make some changes. This emotional detachment was difficult for me to navigate at the time, but looking back, I am so grateful for it because it allowed us to do some major surgery on our life as we knew it. David’s clarity caused us to look at our life differently.

We truly put everything on the table – house, careers, homeschooling, homesteading, hobbies, interests, volunteering. And we set out to make major changes so our life going forward wouldn’t look anything like life pre-amnesia. In our book, we walk through the specific steps we took and we teach how anyone can make these changes, without having to lose your mind in the process. 😉

We realized that the enemy of the best is often the good, and even though our life had been filled with good things, they were wearing us out. We are sure you can relate when you look at your own life and see a to-do list of good things, yet it’s too much and you’re feeling the symptoms of constant stress: being overwhelmed, dreading the day, consistently tired, never feel like you’ve accomplished enough, trapped, anxiety, etc. This is not how God intended us to live.

John 10:10 is one of our favorite verses because it tells us how we were meant to live. It says:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Abundant – full – peaceful life is possible! But it’s also under attack in our culture. Peace, non-scheduled family time, rest, doing less are all things that are not popular. But they’re necessary, and we believe they are worth pursuing – no matter what.

We put our gorgeous homestead on the market and downsized to a smaller home in a neighborhood. This was a big deal for us since our identity had previously been wrapped up in our homestead life. But we were on pursuit for less stress and fewer demands. This surgery had to be done. We now take time to rest when we are tired. We sleep more. We make vacations and get-aways a priority. We listen to the cues from our body when it’s telling us that we need to slow down.

Yes, walking through the experience of amnesia was a nightmare in many ways. But looking back, it was also the greatest gift we could ever have received. It was the wake-up call we needed to get off the rat-race-pace of life and learn to slow down, as God intended.

We hope you’ll grab our book to read more of our story and the life-changing lessons we learned. You can get it here: getbook.at/OneThingRemains. We’d also love to connect with you on Instagram @davidandshannoncarroll or on our website: davidandshannoncarroll.com. Thank you for reading our story today – we can’t wait to hear yours!