TV Scope: Real Life, UTV, Monday, 19th September, 11pm
It's bad news to be a case history. Clive Wearing is such a man. Psychology students study the remarkable story of the former musician who cannot remember anything that happened more than seven seconds ago.
In 1985, he was a successful conductor and choirmaster recently married to his second wife, Deborah. One day, he contracted the cold sore virus, herpes simplex, which normally affects the mouth. But this time, by a chance in many millions, it went to his brain. His brain swelled up and by the next morning his memory had gone. It never returned. Those parts of his brain which could hold long-term memories were destroyed.
Today, as the fascinating Real Life documentary showed us, he lives in a unit 80 miles away from Deborah's home, visited by his wife but forgetting every visit almost instantly.
His adult children find it hard to visit him now because of the distress they feel at his plight.
Clive knows that things are wrong. He thinks he has never or rarely seen a human being for a very long time. He says he is unhappy. Then, when seven seconds have passed, he forgets he is unhappy.
He knows his wife and he loves her. But he can't remember the wedding or single events from their life. He cannot remember a single event from his own life.
He can still play the piano but by the time he has finished playing a piece he has forgotten everything that was happening before he began.
After he suffered the onset of his illness, he cried for a long time. He had enough mental capacity left to know that something bad had happened to him.
Today there still seems to be an awareness that something terrible has happened but he appears to be more settled in himself.
However, he does keep going back to not being able to think. "No thoughts," he says many, many times.
That loss of ability to think things through seems to be the most bitter of all.
Clive remembers Deborah, though. He may think he hasn't seen her for 20 years, but he knows who she is.
And Deborah's love for Clive has endured. Nine years after he lost his memory, Deborah divorced Clive and left England for New York to get away from the pain of the situation. But she could not get Clive out of her system. None of the relationships she started endured because the men "were not Clive". After some years she returned and married him again.
It is sobering to see this and to realise how much of what we are depends on the physical structure of the brain. We like to think we are so much more than that.
But the hard lesson that an injury to the brain can change everything is one that is learned by thousands of people in this State every year. Lives fall apart as loved ones suffer brain injuries in accidents on the road and elsewhere. They get little help and their lives often are full of sacrifice and desperation.
Deborah has campaigned for better services for people in Britain with acquired brain injuries and her campaign has met some success. In Ireland, an organisation called Headway campaigns for such services here. Deborah worked for Headway in the UK.
Because Clive Wearing lost a brilliant career he has been an object of fascination. But he is no rarity: there are many, many Clive Wearings in Ireland even if the cause of their brain injury was a car crash and not a virus. Their dedicated families are living proof that love endures, as is Deborah Wearing. But where the loved one has a brain injury, the burden is very heavy indeed for those who love and for those who are loved.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.