Dad No Longer Recognises Wife & Children After Minor Stroke Attack

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A devastated dad can no longer recognise his wife and children after a minor stroke.

Bob Cockshott, 58, has face blindness, or prosopagnosia. He said: “Once I saw a picture of a couple with a baby and didn’t realise it was me and my wife.”

Bob first knew something was wrong when he couldn’t identify his son at the school gates as he waited for him. He had been discharged after swelling, from the clot on his brain, had gone down and was told the only damage was a tiny loss of vision. Bob added: “But after I did some tests, they told me I had a severe impairment.”

Bob, of Orpington, South East London copes by memorising people’s distinctive features, clothing and speech.

He said: “It is only the faces that I can’t recognise, so I can identify people by their hair or clothing or their mannerisms and posture. If there are people who look similar in the same place then I would really struggle. I wait for people to approach me. When I am in the supermarket my wife will whisper in my ear and say ‘that’s John our neighbour’ or something like that. If a picture of my wife was in front of me and her hair was tied back, I couldn’t say who it was.”

Prosopagnosia, affecting one in 50, is caused by an impairment in the part of the brain that links facial perception and memory. The company director and his wife Clare have been married 22 years and have a son Alex, 13, and daughter Anne, 17. Bob has had to live with his condition since 2008.

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Bob added “Now the kids are grown I can’t remember what they looked like when they were children.”

Source: Mirror