GREENSBORO, N.C. — “I think she liked the experience,” her mom says, with a smile.
“The experience” was Caitlin Little’s first plane ride — to New York City to be on “The Dr. Oz Show.”
Dr. Oz and his staff had seen FOX8’s reports and wanted to do something similar for his show, so they hired a photographer to come to the Littles’ home and shoot video very similar to what FOX8 has done over the last few months.
“’Just shoot all the stuff you’ve seen in [FOX8’s] stories,’” Jennifer Little said, describing what the photographer was told to do.
Jennifer and her husband, Chris, have exhausted all the avenues they could find, looking for some help for Caitlin, who was injured when she was accidentally hit on the head by a cross country teammate at Southeast Guilford High School at a practice in October 2017. Ever since, she has had anterograde amnesia — a condition in which her brain resets every night and everything that happened the day before is lost from her memory. Making little to no progress in her healing has the Littles frustrated.
“Everybody wants to treat symptoms,” Jennifer said. “Nobody has said, ‘We want to look at how to heal her.’ I don’t want to treat symptoms. I don’t want to just get rid of it. Let’s make the headache a little less. I want her to have her life back and I believe it is attainable once we figure out what is actually wrong.”
Dr. Oz didn’t promise answers, but he did say he would see what he could do. They paid for Caitlin’s entire family to make the trip but it seemed most dramatic for Caitlin.
“The second day we were in New York, the girls were in one room, the guys were in the other room and the girls had a wonderful window out on the city with the hustle and bustle of the street deliveries and taxi’s and Ubers and people running everywhere,” Chris said. “So, I got on there after Caitlin had finished her morning routine and was standing in the window looking out across New York. And I let her be for a moment or two and got within five feet of her and said, ‘Caitlin, do you have any questions?’ She just turned around and held up one finger, that, ‘I need a moment. I’ll take it all in.’ Because remember, to her, she went to bed in her room at her home and then woke up the next day in a strange place with a whole city skyline out in front of her.”
Caitlin still had to fight her daily battle of memory loss.
“She had notes on her bed, on her pillow, in her notebook, in the bathroom,” Jennifer said. “So wherever she might be, she can be reminded of what was that going on.”
Dr. Oz didn’t have any definitive answers but the Littles feel like they’re continuing to make progress.
“Our goal is to start finding answers and to make a website and we can all start sharing together instead of it being in several different places,” Jennifer said.
See Caitlin at “The Dr. Oz Show” in this edition of the Buckley Report.
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.
