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Augusto was either unconscious or completely uncontrollable for the rest of the night. "My neck was broken and my skull had cracked. In my jumbled mind, though, there was no way I'd stay in a hospital. I was gonna muscle my way out of there." He was so uncooperative during the first night, as well as his week-long stay in the ICU, that doctors kept him strapped to the bed by his wrists and ankles. Whenever they tried to insert a catheter into him, he would rip it right out.

Next came an inability to hold a memory in his head for more than a few minutes. His family had to explain the accident to him over and over again, everything continually resetting like in Memento:

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Cruelly, he finally understood the plot to Memento, but then promptly forgot it 30 seconds later.

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"Right when I'd say something like, 'Holy shit! You're telling me a bus wheel fell on my head?!' then bam! I'd be asleep again. The whole thing -- waking up, asking what happened, not believing it, finally starting to believe it, falling asleep -- would start over in two-and-a-half minutes. Really -- my brother timed it."

And then came the loss of inhibition. When awake, Augusto displayed all the recklessness and impaired judgment of a drunk. At one point a friend came over. Augusto's mother was in the room with them, fretting over whether all these visits would be bad for his recovery. His reaction was to pick up his cellphone from the bedside table and text his buddy, "Dude, my mom needs to smoke a joint and chill." Unfortunately for him, in his discombobulated state, he didn't send the text to his friend. He sent it to his mom.