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GREENSBORO — Today’s graduation will become one of UNCG senior Bethany Marshall’s most treasured memories. And she knows the value of memories because she’s lost so many.

Marshall, 25, suffered amnesia after a bout of viral encephalitis in her senior year of high school.

One night, she felt ill and was running a high fever. She went to sleep, hoping to feel better. She woke up without her memories.

“I just remember waking up and looking around a room and having no idea where I was,” Marshall says. “I had no idea what was going on, whose pictures and posters were on the wall. ... It was very scary. And that’s my first memory of the world at all.”

Bethany’s parents rushed her to the hospital where she stayed for more than a week. Doctors said the infection affected certain parts of her brain, wiping out particular skills and memories while leaving others intact.

“I could remember how to tie my shoes,” Marshall says. “But I couldn’t remember who my mother and father or brother and sister were.”

Things that had been simple — from using the microwave to playing musical instruments — were now impossible.

“It was pretty hard at first to see her like that,” says Caleb Marshall, 24. “I sort of went from being the little brother to being the big brother, trying to help her out as much as I could.”

Caleb says he could remind Bethany where things were or how to perform simple tasks, but there were some things no one could help her with.

“She would stand in front of a closet full of clothes that she had loved, and she didn’t like any of it,” he says. “She just didn’t know who she was anymore. We all had to get to know someone else now, and she did, too.”

Bethany had been an outgoing, popular student at North Iredell High School in Olin. She was a musician and drum major for the school band. But after amnesia, her closest friends were strangers and she felt alienated. She became shy and withdrawn.

Unsure of who she was, she seized on simple things.

“I must have eaten no meat but chicken for years,” she says, laughing about it now. “It was the first thing I ate that I liked, so I just stuck with that.”

Bethany had enough credits to graduate high school and her mother, a teacher, began filling out college applications. With great grades, she was accepted at a number of schools.

But on the day of her high school graduation, she knew she wasn’t ready for college yet.

“Everyone was so happy for me, my mother was crying,” she says. “But when I walked across the stage and they handed me the diploma, it didn’t really mean anything to me. I had no idea what all the fuss was about.”

She told her mother she wasn’t ready to go to college, that she had to rebuild some of her life before she took the next step. Growth came slowly — she was depressed and had terrible headaches, which still plague her to this day. But she found help from, of all things, reality TV.

The show, “Starting Over,” was in its first season when Bethany saw it on TV one night. Six women lived together in a house and worked with psychologists and life coaches to get over the problems that held them back in their lives. Without telling her parents, she made a home video and sent it to the show’s producers.

A few months later, she was living in Los Angeles as one of the stars of the show’s second season.

“The show really helped me deal with some things,” Bethany says. “They made me realize that whatever I lost, whatever was taken from me, I had to start from now and do what I wanted with my life.”

She returned home with new courage — and when her brother Caleb came to UNCG, she decided to join him. They shared an apartment and she began taking classes — as many as she could, every semester and through the summers — to rediscover the world.

With the help of Jeff Colbert, a professor and adviser, she eventually decided to major in communications.

When a professor asked her class to write a “Who Am I?” essay, she couldn’t help but laugh.

Nine years after her amnesia, Bethany says “Who Am I?” is a question she can answer. She’s rebuilt relationships with her family, met new friends in college and is working part-time in public relations. She says she may go to graduate school.

“I just feel like there’s still so much to learn,” she says. “I’m amazed by new things every day.”

Contact Joe Killian at 373-7023 or joe.killian@news-record.com