GREENSBORO, N.C. — When you have a condition that almost every doctor has never seen before, treatment can be expensive.
First off, traditional methods haven’t seemed to work for Caitlin Little, who was hit on the side of the head at a cross country practice in 2017. Her collision with another runner was an accident, but the fallout from it is very real: Caitlin has anterograde amnesia, which means she wakes up each day with no memory of the day before. This has been the case since the accident 18 months ago.
“The family has done a phenomenal job of really being resourceful about how to handle this,” said Eileen Hogan, who is good friends with Caitlin’s parents, Jennifer and Chris Little. “Jennifer, bless her heart, I know she’s anxious and frustrated and stressed and it’s taken a toll on her and she’s still, every time we see her, she’s got this calm, ‘We are going to figure this out, we are going to know what to do for Caitlin and for her siblings.’ It’s really just such a sign of strength and power.”
But the community is here to help. Many of the Little’s friends – and dozens of strangers – showed up at a fundraiser to help pay for some of Caitlin’s medical bills. It was a cold, rainy night but there were a couple of hundred people at the Moose Lodge for the event titled “Love a Little.”
“What a huge response from the community overall,” Hogan said. “Jennifer works in the schools and I think that’s where this started with people that she knew in the schools but that its got much more bigger than that – gotten involvement from all over the community, its just like a huge southeast community gathering with people coming together.”
“You can see even though Greensboro is a fairly large town from where I grew up, we are still a small town community or we have that mindset, we are there to help, we’re neighbors, you can see that when something like this, you can’t get a parking spot, you can’t get a ticket because its sold out, it’s very encouraging to see,” said Eileen’s husband, Dan Hogan.
It won’t come anywhere close to paying for all of Caitlin’s care but it was a very generous amount that will open avenues to the Littles that wouldn’t be available otherwise.
“I don’t know what we should do, all I know is what we can do,” Chris Little said. “So, we take our limited resources and try to find what is most highly probably to yield those benefits.”
See the great turnout at the fundraiser and what local famous face led the event in this edition of The Buckley Report.
A GoFundMe has been set up to help the Little family.
For previous stories
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