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George Clarke · on someone they love

George Clarke on his mum, and the two times encephalitis took her from them

Speaking on the Great Company podcast, the YouTuber George Clarke described his mother's two episodes of encephalitis — inflammation of the brain — and what each of them left behind. The first, he said, was mostly physical. She was on crutches for around a month, her memory came back, and within a couple of weeks she was largely herself again. The second was far harder. He was about to leave for a hockey camp when his father went upstairs to check on her one more time and found her having a seizure. She went to hospital by ambulance, was put into an induced coma, and was kept on life support for about a week. The family visited every day for around three months. She was back on her feet within roughly three weeks, but this time what the illness took was cognitive rather than physical: a large part of her long-term memory had gone, including the death of her own father, which had to be broken to her again. He said his mother has permanently lost her sense of taste and smell, that her sense of direction is affected — in a restaurant she picks out landmarks on the way to the toilet so she can find her way back — that her sleep is disturbed, and that loud noises startle her badly. What he kept returning to was how little she makes of any of it. When she came out of hospital, he said, the first thing she did was apologise to the family for what she had put them through. George Clarke's mother is not a public figure. She is not named here, and nothing is published about her beyond what her son chose to say publicly himself.

• Encephalitis