A self-described "control freak," Favaloro spent the next week contacting as many people as possible to find out all he could about the recent past. Though he remembered starting his senior year, his memory stopped around the time of Thanksgiving.

Talking to friends from Colby was sometimes difficult. It was hard for them to comprehend that Favaloro really could not remember the events they had shared so recently. It was hard for them to guess what events Favaloro would most want to know about. "You've got people telling you it's nine months later than it is," Favaloro said. "You don't keep a checklist of things to tell a person when this happens."

His two best friends, senior-year roommates, contemplated playing jokes on Favaloro once they found out about the accident. "My first reaction was I wanted to make up some great stories about drunken orgies, but he'd never believe it," Kevin Hausmann '96 said.

But Casey McCullough '96 tried to offer more helpful feedback. "I just wanted him to concentrate on current topics. We talked about stuff going on presently instead of dwelling on what he didn't remember," McCullough said.

For Favaloro, though, there was a desperate desire to build up a specific list of events that had shaped his recent life. "You have no idea of how smart or stupid you have been. . . . Is there a girlfriend that's upset because you haven't called her in a few days?" he wondered. He found out through McCullough and Hausmann that he had had three relationships during his senior year. He couldn't remember any of them.

Under the circumstances, admissions officers at Penn suggested Favaloro defer enrollment for a year and he agreed readily since he felt "cheated" of his senior year and was having doubts about attending Penn anyway.

He had applied to Penn, the University of California at Irvine and Dartmouth. Colby's Miselis Professor of Chemistry, Brad Mundy, had helped him secure the position at Penn, a school Favaloro did not know very well but considered a good career move. A postal snafu somehow derailed correspondence from Dartmouth, and both Favaloro and the college had concluded erroneously that there was a mutual lack of interest.

After the accident, Favaloro had doubts about the decision he did not remember making. As a native of suburban Massachusetts who spent his undergraduate years in rural Maine, Favaloro couldn't understand why he had wanted to go to the urban campus in Philadelphia for the next five or more years of his life. "It's fantastic for anyone's career to go there but it's not the kind of environment I wanted to be in," he said.

At his doctor's recommendation, Favaloro decided to return to Colby to try to stimulate memory-triggers at the familiar campus. Colby cooperated, offering him two part-time jobs--one in admissions and another in the Chemistry Department, together again with his mentor, Brad Mundy.

His doctor told him he could expect his memory to return after two months, but Ed Yeterian, Colby's Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of Psychology and an expert on neuropsychology, told him it could take up to 10 months.