"A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back."

By Demetri Kofinas (via Metafilter). Excerpt:

My tumor had been reduced to a fraction of its original size... My assumption was that since I couldn’t remember anything during my amnesia, the memories had never formed to begin with. This was utterly false. Instead, everything that happened to me from the onset of my symptoms was sitting in my repaired brain, waiting....

There was so much past to go through, and for the most part, I didn’t feel in control of the discoveries. Instead, memories felt more like revelations. They began to pour onto the neural highways of my brain like a torrential summer rain....

I learned, for example, that for months before my surgery, I had been working with real estate agents in search of a new apartment. On one occasion, I was shown two different apartments in the same building–300 East 23rd Street–and needed to go back and forth between them because I kept forgetting what I had just seen.....