39 years erased Man wakes up from coma and believes it is 1980

Italian Luciano D'Adamo is hit by a car in 2019. When he wakes up after a coma, he thinks he is in 1980. The last 39 years of his life have been erased.

In 2019, the Italian Luciano D'Adamo is hit by a car. He suffers life-threatening injuries and falls into a coma.

The coma does not last long. But: the then 63-year-old is convinced that it was March 20, 1980.

He was 24 years old at the time, worked as part of the ground staff at Fiumicino Airport and was about to get married, as the Italian newspaper "Il Messaggero" reports.

His memories of his wife and son have disappeared

He realized how big his memory gap really was when he no longer recognized his wife. He had remembered her as a young, 19-year-old woman. To him, she was now an older, strange lady. His 30-year-old son didn't recognize D'Adamo either. He seemed older than he felt.

Probably the most painful moment, however, was when he saw himself in the mirror. Instead of a 24-year-old man, he saw a 63-year-old with gray hair and wrinkles on his face. 39 years of his life were gone.

Today, five years later, D'Adamo works as a janitor in a school. Contact with children helped him to reintegrate into society. But the road to recovery was not easy: the recovery was long and required a lot of patience from the now 58-year-old and those around him.

He is said to have seen a smartphone for the first time

Doctors and psychologists helped him to accept the gap in his memory. Things that others take for granted were foreign to him. For example, he had to relearn what a smartphone was and how to use it. Or how a car navigation system worked.

His wife and son were there to help him. Thanks to his family, especially his grandchildren, he has a fixed point of reference in his life again. Some memories are slowly returning.