The amnesia that Vesna Vulović experienced as a result of the crash deserves examination as a phenomenon, not simply as an inconvenient gap in the first-person testimony. What happened to her memory in the crash — and the nature of the blank that it left — is itself a significant element of the medical story of her survival.
Amnesia following traumatic brain injury is well-documented in the clinical literature. The fractured skull and cerebral hemorrhage that Vulović sustained are injuries of a type that commonly produce memory loss of two distinct kinds: retrograde amnesia (loss of memories formed before the injury) and anterograde amnesia (inability to form new memories after the injury, lasting for some period).
The pattern she describes — losing approximately an hour of memory before the crash and approximately a month of memory after waking from the coma — is consistent with a combination of both types. The pre-crash hour is retrograde amnesia; the post-coma month is anterograde amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia following traumatic brain injury tends to be graded: the most recent memories before the injury are most vulnerable to loss, while older memories are more likely to be preserved. This is consistent with the experience she describes — she remembers her life, her childhood, her career decision, everything up to the moments immediately before the crash, but loses the most recent period before the explosion.
Anterograde amnesia — the inability to form new memories after a brain injury — typically resolves as the brain recovers, but the memories that should have been formed during the period of anterograde amnesia are not subsequently recoverable because they were never fully consolidated. This is why she has no memory of the rescue, the early hospital period, or the approximately month-long period after the coma lifted before her memory function resumed: those experiences happened, but they did not produce lasting memories in the usual way.