KATIE Couric has opened up about a terrifying health scare that caused severe memory loss.
The 69-year-old suffered a “freak” medical episode last month while a panelist at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.
Katie spoke about the incident in a Substack essay posted on Monday, in which she admitted to having zero recollection of her participation in the event.
In the essay titled “The Day I’ll Never Remember,” the Daytime Emmy Award winner revealed she didn’t recall meeting half of her fellow speakers, nor did she have any memory of what they discussed onstage.
“I have met Jelani [Cobb] and know Aaron [Parnas] a bit, but right now, I couldn’t pick Amy [Webb] or Jerusalem [Demsas] out of a lineup,” Katie said of the other panelists.
“I have no idea what we talked about, or of what occurred when the panels ended,” she added.
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Katie explained that an intern alerted her husband, John Molner, that the journalist appeared “out of it,” and he took her to Aspen Valley Hospital to get checked out.
John didn’t initially believe his wife’s behavior was a cause for concern, chalking it up to “altitude sickness.”
“I noticed nothing unusual in the conversation or Katie’s role,” the 63-year-old added.
“Having spent a lot of time in Aspen since I was a kid, I assumed Katie was dehydrated and suffering from some form of altitude sickness – something common among visitors to a town that’s about 7,900 feet above sea level.”
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However, they realized the severity of Katie’s issues when hospital staff asked her the month, year, and who the president was, which she got all wrong.
“I wasn’t sure of the month. I thought it was 2024. And I believed Joe Biden was president,” the former Today show anchor wrote.
While doctors first thought Katie’s symptoms were the result of a stroke, an MRI showed there was something else going on.
She was then diagnosed with transient global amnesia, which she described as “a sudden, temporary loss of the ability to form new memories.”
A neurologist assured the journalist that her memory would return the next day, and, thankfully, it did.
“This was a freaky occurrence, it could have been much more serious,” Katie told readers.
“Ultimately, I’m relieved – even though several hours of a Saturday in June will always be missing for me.”
The TV star has unfortunately dealt with health problems in the past.
She was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in 2022 and underwent lumpectomy, radiation therapy, and aromatase inhibitors.
Katie was declared cancer-free following her treatments that same year.
