Emily Hershenson has been safe and sound for days now; now all that’s left is figuring out exactly where she was.

Normally, that would be easy. Hershenson herself could say. But Hershenson’s husband, Tom Hershenson, says she can’t remember what happened during the two days she went missing last week. “She remembers getting up and going to work,” he says, but that’s it. “She says it’s like trying to remember a dream three days later.”

A former Capitol Hill staffer who lives in Adams Morgan, Hershenson was on her way to her job as a social worker the morning of March 21 when she suddenly went off the radar.

Tom Hershenson called her office that morning and was told she never arrived. On March 23, Hershenson was spotted near the Mall, after word went out that she’d vanished. The news had spread quickly via posters and news outlets, thanks in part to Hershenson’s connections from her time on the Hill. (Washington City Paper, for instance, received emails asking us to post a dispatch about the search, which we did.)

Tom Hershenson says when police recovered his wife, it looked as if she’d hit her head. She also had two small bruises on her side. He says when he first talked to his wife, it was apparent she’d experienced some memory loss: “She knew her name was Emily, but didn’t know what her last name was.”

She quickly recovered. Hershenson says his wife is back to normal now,  and following up about the episode with neurologists. One theory doctors have put out there is that Hershenson experienced a seizure; another is that a new medication she was on caused her to become disoriented.

Though postpartum depression was discussed in the comments section of various news articles and blog posts regarding Hershenson’s disappearance, her husband says she wasn’t suffering from that condition. She did go through postpartum depression once in the past, he says, but what she experienced last Monday was “completely different.”

The couple is slowly getting back to their routine.”We’re working on becoming as boring as we were,” says Tom Hershenson. Hershenson is a little embarrassed about all the attention she got, and is eager to go back to work but will spend a little more time recuperating, he says.

Photo courtesy of Tom Hershenson