Intermittant Short Term Memory Loss

[Bill Meade]

My wife (age 34) has had intermittant loss of short term (i.e., the last 
two weeks of events when it happens) memory for the past 12 years. 
Frequency is about once every 8 months (sometimes once a year others 
once a month).  In the past 5 years she's had a CatScan, EEG (had the 
memory loss while on the EEG machine the first time but no symptoms were 
picked up) twice, and one year ago she had an MRI.  MRI showed some 
shrinkage around the  brain stem (in the neurologist's words) but nothing 
else major. 
  
She had another episode 3 weekends ago.  It happend (as is often the 
case) while she was taking a short nap.  She wakes up not knowing what is 
going on (not disoriented just no memeories).  It looks for all the world 
like a hard disk is being decheckerboarded and is interrupted in the 
middle.  All the pointers are gone and have to be rebuilt.  In about 24 
hours she is back to normal and the memories are back except for a few 
fuzzy facts (she reviews shopping lists etc. to nail down as many details 
as possible).  Only drug she is on is birth control pills.  We have 3 
kids under 10 and are under no huge stresses.  Yes, we called the   
neurologist about this but he had no new ideas.   
  
If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it if you would contact me and   
let me know.  We're at a loss about where to go next and have gone into   
"broacast mode" to avoid overlooking any simple cures that might exist.   
 
Bill Meade sbmeade at umslvma.umsl.edu