For an Illinois teenager, enduring the same repetitive loop of a few hours every day was a distressing reality, not just a bad dream.
Riley Horner, a college student, experienced a severe concussion while attending a school dance. Initially, doctors assured her family that she was fine and discharged her from the hospital. However, it soon became evident that the then 16-year-old was not okay at all.
Since June 11, 2019, Riley, now 21, had been waking up each morning believing it was still that date and that she needed to prepare for a big dance that night.
During the party, Riley was on the dance floor when a teenage boy, who was crowd surfing, accidentally fell on her.
Only a few hours after leaving the hospital, Riley’s condition worsened dramatically. She experienced a series of 30 to 45 seizures, as explained by her mom, Sarah.
The next morning, Riley’s family realized something was wrong when she couldn’t remember any of the traumatic events from the night before. To her, it seemed as though she still had to get ready for the dance that had already passed.
As time went on, her memory continued resetting to that specific date every two hours.
Whenever she realized the true date, she would check her phone, finding numerous updates in her Notes app to catch up on everything that had occurred since the accident.
“I have notes on my phone, when I got up this morning there’s like thousands of notes,” she revealed to Fox News in an interview.
Riley’s condition was later identified as a severe concussion that previous evaluations had overlooked, along with a TBI (traumatic brain injury), impacting her ability to concentrate, prioritize, and retain information.
With a diagnosis from post-concussion specialists at Cognitive FX, a treatment plan was developed to assist Riley in enhancing her memory.
In just a week of undergoing therapy, Riley began forming new memories, although she remains unable to recall events between June 11, 2019, and December 2019.
In a recent update on the Facebook page Help Riley Remember, her mother shared that Riley is set to be a senior nursing major later this year, having spent the summer interning in Med Surge at a local hospital.
Riley continues to take medication for her seizures and might never fully return to her previous self, but her family remains hopeful, continually seeking effective treatments for her.
Despite the financial burden, Sarah expresses that every expense is justified if it means helping her daughter regain her life.
You can contribute to Riley’s treatment here.