Abi Morgan's husband was in a coma. When he woke, he thought she was an imposter.

Abi Morgan is one of the most acclaimed and brilliant screenwriters in the world. But it's her own life that became stranger than fiction several years ago.  

In her compelling, and oftentimes heart-wrenching, chat with No Filter host Mia Freedman, the award-winning UK writer recounts a seemingly idyllic life with her partner of 18 years, actor Jacob Krichefski, and their two teenage children. Their lives were the usual hustle and bustle of working parents and coming-of-age kids living in North London... and then, on a hot day in June 2018, everything changed.

Jacob - who Abi calls Jake - wasn't feeling well. That wasn't entirely unusual because Jacob had Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a chronic disease that attacks the central nervous system. At the time, Abi even laughed it off as "man-flu". Since he had developed a slight rash, she ducked out to get some steroids for him.

"When I came back, I found him collapsed on the bathroom floor," Abi tells Mamamia. "He was collapsed in a way that I thought he was just laying down in there because the tiles were cool. But he was just not making sense. He just had repetitive speech. And I knew immediately something was very wrong."

Listen to Mia Freedman's full interview with Abi Morgan on the No Filter podcast below. Story continues after audio.

Paramedics rushed them to hospital, where Abi somewhat hilariously admits her screenwriter brain started to write out scenes as though she was in a film. "The five-year-old in me, who loved the drama, who loved the hit of the punchline, the hit of the plot twist, it was there."

At first, it seemed Jacob had had some kind of seizure. But then, over the next two weeks, he "physically, cognitively, psychiatrically, just unravelled". It was apparent that whatever he was going through wasn't a simple infection or viral meningitis or a relapse - it was actually life-threatening.

"I think that was when the world started to slow," Abi says. "And I realised it was not just that I was in a drama, but the world had tipped upside down. And it was like you were walking on the ceiling, looking down on your life going, 'This is surreal, totally surreal.' Nobody prepares you for how physical trauma is."

Abi even found herself hoping a tumour would be found in Jacob's brain, because at least that would make sense. 

"Jacob went from talking non-stop, talking in Shakespearean language - 'What is my duty? What is my cause? Why am I here?' - to mute catatonic, staring into space, to turning into some kind of Boardwalk Empire gangster, and punching everybody; they had to put a guard on his door," she explains. "It was, 'What the hell's going on?' It didn't make any sense."

Just as Jacob was being put into a medically induced coma (for brain recovery and to stop the seizures), the doctors discovered the cause of his illness - it was autoimmune encephalitis called "brain on fire".

Jacob ended up being in a coma for seven months.

While he was in a coma, life had to go on - albeit surreally - for Abi, their kids, and both their families. She tried to be the "master of fun" and had a Love Island party where they all got dressed up, did their nails, drank, and watched the final episode. She celebrated her 50th birthday with 50 friends in their kitchen. 

"It's sort of weird, the idea that I should be wearing black and sitting by Jacob's bed. You just can't do that," Abi says.

"The truth is, when someone is in a coma, there is a level of inactivity or impotency you have as a family member because that's the essential parts of it. One of the things I found very interesting was towards the end of Jake's coma, when he was still very much submerged in it, a notice went up above his bed and said, 'Do not overstimulate the patient; no more than 15 minutes conversation.'

"And I suddenly realised again, I'd sort of given up on the idea that Jake could hear us, and I was reminded that Jake was starting to come up and a lot of what was going on around him was becoming incredibly stimulating. And so that was when I realised that, okay, we've got to go back in again and connect."

The doctors kept trying to bring Jacob out of his medically induced coma but every time they took him off the anaesthesia, he would have another seizure. But finally they gave him a "wonder drug", which was a chemotherapy drug, and his seizures went down.

Slowly, Jacob started to wake up. His eyes began opening and closing. When he was being trimmed and shaved, he would rattle his nose when the barber blew on his hair.

"What I really remember was he woke to a point where his eyes were open, and the thing that was incredibly exciting was he started to track people, which was such a good sign that there was brain activity there," Abi says. "At that point, we knew that there was going to be some kind of brain damage, but we didn't know to what degree. But the tracking was a really good sign."

He also started smiling and doing "thumbs up", which were again very good signs. The biggest moment for Abi was when she came into Jacob's hospital room one day and there was a speech and language woman there.

"I remember watching him eat a strawberry yogurt, and she said, 'Would you like to speak now, Jake?' And he was like, 'Yeah, I'd like to speak.' And that was just like, 'Oh my God', because he didn't sound like him. His voice had gone very North London. That was odd. So there were all of these sorts of little oddities," Abi explains.

"But as a family, we were sort of going 'Hey, Jake, it's us.' And of course, he was very sweet. He was a little bit like a bear waking up. He would smile at the children... But as he started to speak a little bit, we started to get a few words. I'd say that went on for about two, three weeks of just sort of coming to, and we were able to start to take him out in a wheelchair. And then they removed his tracheotomy. He came off the ventilator. And it was amazing. I think we were all like, oh, my gosh, he's here. We could see he was there."

Just as everything seemed to be going smoothly in terms of Jacob's recovery from his coma, Abi noticed something strange.

"I could see there was something profoundly different in him, the way he looked at me. I just thought there's something not right here. He looked at me a combination of, at times completely blank, very quizzical, and often irritated," she tells Mamamia.

"And at first, I thought it was a general thing. But then I started to notice the delight in which he greeted his parents... the smile or the 'Hey, Dad.' He wouldn't use my name. He was just off with me. He wasn't warm. I remember one day I went to kiss him on the lips, and he [turned his head away]."

The day Abi realised that something was really, really wrong was on Valentine's Day. She went into the hospital that day with a "cheesy red cellophane heart" and tied it to the end of Jacob's bed.

"The nurses had very sweetly bought everybody these cheap red roses, the kind of thing you get on a holiday, and she was like, 'Jake, give your wife a rose', and he said, 'She's not my wife.' And in that moment I went, 'Well, actually, he's kind of right, because I'm his girlfriend [they were not married]. I'm his partner; I'm not his wife.

"I went, 'What do you mean?' And I started to ask questions, and he says, 'I don't know who you are. I don't know how you're fooling everyone.' I was like, 'Where is Abi?' He says, 'You're not Abi Morgan.' And I said, 'Well, where is Abi Morgan?' and then he went, 'She's gone. She's got a new life with someone else'."

It turned out that Jacob had engaged in fabulation, where his brain had made up a story to make sense of what had happened to him. The story he had told himself was that Abi had left him for someone else and that he was now living in an apartment overlooking Hampstead Heath in London.

"At first, it was just incredulous. I remember I started to shake. It felt like the subway was underneath me," Abi recalls.

"I remember driving and saying to my sister, 'He doesn't know who I am.' And she said, 'That can't be true. That's not true. It's really not true.' And of course, that's everyone's natural reaction, because they feel huge pain for you. It's so bizarre. It's such a cliche. It felt like a bad, bad plot twist."

Jacob was diagnosed with Capgras syndrome, which is called the "imposter syndrome" or the "delusion of doubles". Basically, he thought Abi was an imposter - that she wasn't who she said she was. After the shock wore off, there was a time pressure to get Jacob to remember Abi, because if the delusion didn't go after three and a half months, it would likely remain forever.

Understandably, Abi started to get "pissed off and bored with it all." She would argue with Jacob about who she really was.

"I would go, 'Am I Abi Morgan today?' and he would go, 'You're definitely not Abi Morgan.' At first he was very resistant to me," she says. "Then I came one day, and he said, 'You're working for the State, aren't you?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm working for the State. Is that okay?' He said, 'Yeah, that's why you're here to help me and the kids', and so that's where we settled."

Abi says it was "deeply, deeply creepy" when the person you love looks back at you blankly. It was also humiliating, as she was the only person in Jacob's life who had been rendered an imposter. It took a lot of time, patience, and talking for him to get to believe she was who she said she was.

And, to exacerbate an already delicate situation - and to prove that truth really is stranger than fiction - Abi was diagnosed with breast cancer only a few months after Jacob came out of his coma. Even more strangely, it was her cancer that brought a renewed sense of closeness with her partner.

"I took Jake out for lunch one day and it was this ridiculous situation where I was kind of having my chemo and coming in the next day to see him [in hospital] and I was looking worse than he was but the two of us together just look ridiculous," she says with a laugh. 

"He just looked at me, and I have a very flat back of the head and it's a kind of family joke. But the theory is that my mum never moved me in my pram; I just got dumped in my pram and I never got moved. So my head's completely flat. I had absolutely no hair at that time. And he just looked at me, and he slumped forward, and he put his hand on the back of my head. And he sort of pulled it forward. He said, 'Your head's flat at the back', and I went, 'Yeah'.

"And he went, "Just like Abi Morgan.' And I went, 'Yeah, like Abi Morgan.' And I just saw this look... I started to notice he was looking out for me when I'd arrive, you know, he'd be waiting for me."

After many months, both Abi and Jacob healed. In her chat on No Filter as well as her memoir This Is Not A Pity Memoir, Abi talks about the lasting psychological - and, in the case of Jacob especially, physical - impact on both of them. Yet despite the trauma they've endured, there is also happiness.

Abi and Jacob on their wedding day. Image: Supplied.

"I wanted to make sure that I could always look after Jake, I could always be there for him. And that I wanted to tie our families together and go, 'It's okay. It's okay. I'm not I'm not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere. We're together.' So we got married," Abi says. "We had an amazing day, just all of us... It was really special and really lovely."

So, does Jacob remember Abi? Does he know she is not an imposter who works for the State and hasn't run off with another man? Listen to Mia Freedman's full chat with Abi Morgan on No Filter. 

For more episodes of No Filter with Mia Freedman, go to mamamia.com.au/podcasts/no-filter.

This Is Not A Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan is out now.

Feature image: Instagram @abimorgan9