THE VOW: A Real Love Story [ONE SHOT]

THE VOW: A Real Love Story

When Krickitt Carpenter settles down to watch the video of her own wedding, she remembers nothing of that day. 'I do recognise the girl in the white dress walking down the aisle. She looks just like me, the 24-year old Krickitt, but I have no memory of how that girl feels,' Krickitt, now 42, admits sadly.

Just ten weeks after that day, a horrific car accident put Krickitt in a coma for four months. When she awoke, she had no memory of the two years leading up to the accident. She didn't even know who her husband was.

Kim and Krickitt Carpenter had been driving from their home in Las Vegas, New Mexico to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit Krickitt's parents for Thanksgiving. Krickitt, who was in the driver's seat, tried to swerve around a slow-moving lorry, when a truck following too closely on their tail hit the Carpenter's car from behind, sending it rolling for a hundred feet and ripping off the roof.

Kim was bloodied and bruised, with broken ribs, a broken nose and severe lacerations. Krickitt, however, had to be cut out, unconscious, from the wreckage and airlifted to hospital. 'I knew nothing until I awoke from a coma almost four months later, with no idea where I was or what had happened,' she says today.

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The head injuries Krickitt had sustained in the accident were so severe that at first she remembered nothing - not how to dress herself, brush her teeth, not even how to walk. 'But these skills were all stored in my long-term memory, so once I was shown how to do them in intensive therapy, they came flooding back,' she says.

Her short-term memory, however, was much more severely and permanently damaged. In fact, Krickitt's memory had been wiped clean of the entire two years before the crash, the years in which she had met and married Kim. And 18 years on, those memories have never been recovered.

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'The nurses asked me what I could remember of my husband, but I told them "I'm not married," she says. 'I could recall names of some previous boyfriends, but nothing of this man who had apparently not left my bedside for months.'

'Not only did she not remember that we were married, but she didn't even recognise me,' says Kim, now 46. 'I was devastated, of course, but I tried not to dwell on it, because I was just so glad she was alive.'

'And as a university baseball coach, I went into work mode,' he says. 'I thought she may never remember me again, and even if she does, she may never want anything to do with me, but I was not going to leave until she had the consciousness to look me in the eye and tell it was over. Until then, I wasn't going to give up on her.'

Kim's determination to rehabilitate his young wife, who had been a talented gymnast before the accident, was not well received by Krickitt, whose head injuries has also caused some personality changes, making her angry, impatient and aggressive.

'I didn't want him around, pushing me through arduous physical therapy. I was cross with him for trying to tell me what to do' she admits. 'I tried to be civil to him because it was obvious he cared about it, but I had no feelings for him.'

'And I felt as if my role had changed from being a husband to being a father,' says Kim. 'I did push her in rehab. She was a former gymnast who used to be able to do backflips on a 4-inch beam, and now could barely stand up. She hated the therapy, and she hated me for making her do it. She kept telling me: 'I don't know you, go back to where you came from'. We really didn't get along.'

The bickering and frustration was a very different story from just a few months earlier, when the couple were in the throes of a whirlwind romance.