Jess Hardiman
A young woman found herself waking up every day thinking it was 11 June after suffering a horrific brain injury.
College student Riley Horner was rushed to hospital in 2019 after a crowd surfer at a dance in Springfield, Illinois, fell and landed on top of her.
After doctors ran a few tests, Riley was sent home in the belief that she was ‘fine’, but within just a few hours of leaving hospital she had a series of 30 to 45 seizures.
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“They took her straight to the hospital from the dance,” her mum Sarah said in an interview with Fox News later that year.
“They released her; said she was fine.”
The next morning, the then-16-year-old woke up thinking it was 11 June all over again – the trauma of what had happened to her completely erased from her memory, with the teen excited to go to the dance that evening.
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In the days that followed, her memory then kept resetting to that date every two hours.
Whenever she realised that something was up, Riley had to go to her phone to find countless updates on the Notes app to explain what had happened.
"I have notes on my phone, when I got up this morning there’s like thousands of notes," she said.
Mum Sarah added: “When she realizes she’s not there, she knows something’s wrong and then she goes to her phone, she’ll ask questions sometimes, sometimes she doesn’t.
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“Sometimes she’ll say, ‘why is there snow on the ground in June?’”
The family searched for a doctor who could help, and eventually found a team in Utah who could diagnose her through tests.
They discovered that Riley had a severe concussion and a TBI (traumatic brain injury), which had affected her ability to focus, prioritise, focus and store information.
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After the diagnosis from post-concussion specialists Cognitive FX put together a plan to help her improve her memory, and within just one week Riley started making her first new memories.
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While she still hasn’t been able to recall anything that happened between 11 June 2019 and December 2019, she has been making progression – and thanks to the treatment she’s even able to retain enough of her memory to get to nursing school, having previously dreamt of becoming a doctor.
In an update posted by her mother earlier this year, she revealed: "She’s had some very hard semesters, but she made it.
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"Actually when I wrote this, I was in the car headed to her WHITE COAT ceremony!!! She’s made it through her class work in nursing and is now on the clinical side of things."
Riley, now 20, is still on medication for the seizures, and will likely never return to exactly how she was before the accident, but the family are taking joy in what they can.
"It’s hard to see her sometimes have to work so much harder than others," Sarah wrote in a recent update on the 'Help Riley Remember' Facebook page.
"Riley still suffers from memory loss, not as bad as every two hours, but things just don’t stick all the time.
"And unfortunately there’s no rhyme or reason what sticks and what doesn’t. This bothers her a lot. It’s hard in normal conversations and it’s very hard with nursing school."
Thankfully, Riley’s in the right place at college, where many of her friends are nursing majors and can help with her ongoing seizures.
"We hear all the time how good she looks, how good she’s doing, and how she looks like she’s thriving," Sarah said.
"That’s because TBIs are an invisible disease. You can’t see her struggles most of the time, but I do."
You can donate to Riley's treatment here.