Taylor Swift Fan Started to Forget Her Favorite Song Lyrics. Then She Had Her Brain Scanned (2025)

• Hannah-Ireland Durando, 24, woke up one morning, having lost her “zest for life”
• She began having headaches and struggling with forgetfulness, unable to recall the lyrics to her favorite Taylor Swift songs — but doctors "dismissed" her
• After she collapsed at work, scans and tests showed she had a tangle of vessels pressing on her brain

A North Carolina woman started forgetting the lyrics to her favorite Taylor Swift songs, gaining weight, and experiencing a personality shift from “outgoing” to “unfeeling” —all symptoms of an undiagnosed abnormality in her brain.

Hannah-Ireland Durando, 24, was a self-described “party animal” and “extrovert” who “loved to hang out with friends,” she told South West News Service via MSN.

But one morning in February 2024, that all changed.

As Durando told the outlet, “I woke up one morning and had no zest for life.”

“I used to be really outgoing, a Marvel fan, and a huge nerd who would have movie nights with my friends,” the costume designer and actress from Winston-Salem, N.C., said. “But nothing made me excited.”

She became lethargic, and would “just ‘rot’ in bed, which was unlike me.”

“I even forgot the lyrics to my favorite Taylor Swift song, ‘Haunted (Taylor’s Version),’ ” Durando said, sharing that “I was in the car driving to work, singing along, and then my head went blank when it came to the chorus. I just thought that perhaps this was normal as you grow up.”

She was already on anti-anxiety medicine, and thought perhaps she had depression.

“I genuinely convinced myself this is who I am now,” Durando explains, saying that when her emotions began to “spiral” and she experienced headaches, she went to the doctor — where she was “completely dismissed.”

“The doctors told me that women get headaches and that it is normal as people get older,” she said. “There were no answers to what I was going through, and they told me to keep an eye on it.”

In July, she went for a checkup and learned she’d gained 30 lbs. “All the doctors seemed to focus on was my gender, age, and weight,” she said. “I felt like I was being ignored and not taken seriously.”

Durando struggled with more extreme forgetfulness. “I often found myself unable to sing along to my favorite Taylor Swift tracks," she said, adding, "my clothes didn’t fit.”

The next month, she was at work and collapsed.

“I felt a stabbing pain in my left ear and my vision went yellow,” Durando said. “I felt like I was being strangled; that was when I hit the floor.”

Doctors ordered a CT scan, which at first, appeared to show a tumor pressing against her left frontal lobe — the part of the brain that manages emotions, muscle control, memory, and personality.

But in December, doctors discovered it wasn’t a tumor, but was a cavernoma — an abnormal tangle of blood vessels that can bleed, or cause seizures of a stroke. “The doctors thought it was an aneurysm at first because I was hemorrhaging,” she said. “There was a lot of confusion and when I got my diagnosis, my first thought was that I was going to die. ”

Due to its location, she can’t have surgery to correct it,and lives with painful migraines and needs regular occupational therapy for her balance. “I was told I had to live carefully from now on,” she said. “I live in fear and uncertainty, as I could have a stroke at any time, develop slurred speech, or forget most things.”

“I hope no one has to experience what I’ve gone through and that it inspires more women to advocate for themselves," Durando said.

“I just wish I had said something sooner and that I wasn’t ignored."

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