GREENSBORO, N.C. — For two months now, we’ve been telling the story of how Caitlin Little and her family have been desperately searching for some healing.
Caitlin was accidentally hit on the head while she was running at cross country practice back in October 2017. It left her with a traumatic brain injury and anterograde amnesia. That’s a condition in which she can remember each day as she lives it, but when she sleeps at night, her brain resets and she wakes up in the morning with no memory of the day before. It’s been like that every day since the accident.
Caitlin’s parents, Chris and Jennifer Little, thought they would find some answers. Maybe it would take a few weeks – even a few months – but they never thought they’d be here, now 18 months after the injury, no closer to a solution than they were the week it happened.
“I’m angry. I’m sad for her. I, I don’t, I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Jennifer, about the condition they still find themselves in. “We do stress about that. We’re wondering, right? We thought we were going to be saving for college. Now we’re saving for care.”
As FOX8 did the series of stories – this is the 12th in that series – they debated on whether to let Caitlin watch them. FOX8 was at their home one night, when they showed her one. When it was over, Jennifer leaned in to ask Caitlin what she thought.
“A lot of your friends are worried for you,” Jennifer tells her. “You’re normally the girl with all the encouraging words, right? What would you want them to know of where you are? How you’re feeling?”
“I’d say that we’re in the process of healing,” Caitlin responds, without much emotion.
“We are,” Jennifer said. But it is not coming fast enough for anyone involved.
That has left all of the Littles wondering if this is as good as it’s going to get for Caitlin. They very much wanted FOX8 to tell this story to help get the word out in the hope of finding the answers that were eluding them in the medical community they had been dealing with so far.
But watching each episode and hearing the podcast can be tough, at times. Jennifer often listens to the podcast as she’s coming home from work or maybe out running errands by herself.
“So don’t let them know you’re home,” she says about sitting in her car in the driveway, sometimes, just taking a moment for herself. “And I’m listening to the podcast, I’m looking at the footage of each episode. It brings back what we really have had no time to look at. And that is what have we done and almost 18 months now, that’s coming up very soon. You’re sort of in triage. I feel like we’re always in this emergency situation and we don’t take time to look back. And so when you do your story, it sort of hits you and you realize we’ve gone through a lot, we’ve lost a lot and you start second guessing and wondering if we had done this, would we be here? Could we have helped if we’d done this?”
And it’s not just family. See the others from Caitlin’s circle who feel as if they’ve lost a lot, in this episode of “Caitlin Can’t Remember.”
A GoFundMe has been set up to help the Little family.
Subscribe to the Caitlin Can’t Remember podcast in the iTunes store or Google Play and get updates on Caitlin’s condition and her family’s search for answers, or you can just click on the podcast player below.
