Bride struck down with amnesia marries 'stranger'

Medical experts on Teesside are battling to solve the mystery of a mum’s epilepsy which left her unable to recognise her husband-to-be on her wedding day. Katie Spinks looks like any blushing bride on her big day, smiling alongside new husband Mike. Yet the 25-year-old woman hid a brave secret behind her smile. Less than an hour before her wedding, she suffered an epileptic fit so severe it caused memory loss. And when she came round she didn’t know she was engaged, let alone that it was her wedding day. And she had no idea who Mike was.



Three years on from her June 2007 wedding in Darlington, Katie is being put through a series of tests by doctors at James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough to work out why her epilepsy is so severe and debilitating. Despite not recognising the man in the black suit waiting for her at the altar, the brave mum exchanged vows with the “stranger” - only later remembering what it was all about when her memory came back. It wasn’t the first – or last – time Katie suffered such a severe fit. The mum-of-two now hopes the tests will help to bring her condition under control.

Recalling her wedding day, the Darlington mum said: “My dad Tony turned up at the house to take me to church in a Rolls Royce, but then a white flash went off in my head. When I came round I thought ‘why am I wearing something so long and white?’ and it dawned on me I was in a wedding dress. “Dad gave me a reassuring smile and said ‘you’re getting married today, love, to Mike – you’ve been engaged for years. You have two beautiful daughters together’. He explained about my epilepsy on the way, so I walked up the aisle and said my vows. Even as I said ‘I do’, I had no idea who I was agreeing to spend the rest of my life with.



“It was about an hour into the reception that it all came back to me, I looked at Mike and said ‘hello husband!’.” The fits first started around four years ago, when she fell pregnant with her second daughter Jade, now three. Doctors believe it was sparked by the pregnancy, prompting her to be sterilised after Jade was born. Now she suffers up to 20 fits a day. She forgets Mike and children Jade and Lucie, five, on a daily basis. Next month she finds out the results of an electro-encephalography test – or EEG – in which electrical activity along the scalp is recorded. If that fails to show up anything she’ll be admitted to hospital.

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