(BBC) – When Rory Curtis awoke from his coma, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know how he had got there. He couldn’t remember his past as a promising teenage striker at Manchester United’s academy; nor the slow demise of his football career; nor the crash that had left him with a shattered hip, a broken elbow, a multifocal intracranial haemorrhage and a diffused brain injury.
When his eyes blinked open and he began to speak, fluent French poured out, a language he had only studied in school, all of which had long since been forgotten.
He spoke so fluidly, with such perfect intonation, that the nurse attending to him, a native French speaker, asked his father which part of France Curtis was from.
His Gallic tongue lasted only as long as that initial conversation, though. Like the memory of a dream, his ability to speak French quickly vanished. CONTINUE