GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — Most people’s email inbox probably doesn’t look much like Chris Little’s.
He has hundreds of emails from himself. They’re his ad hoc diary of his daughter’s progress — or, in some cases, lack of it.
“It started out just as a way for me to remember things that might be important, some day,” Chris says.
His daughter, Caitlin Little was at cross country practice on Thursday, Oct. 12, 2017, when one of her teammates accidentally collided heads with Caitlin, leaving her with a form of anterograde amnesia in which her memory is relatively normal from that day back, but since then, her memory erases every minute or so.
After more than three years and dozens of doctors, the Littles think they may finally have reason for hope.
“We’re all cautiously optimistic,” says Chris.
To find that hope, they had to traverse a majority of the country to go to the Dakota Stem Cell Institute in Rapid City, South Dakota. That’s where Dr. Raymond Pierce works, though he has only started using stem cell therapy later in his career when some other physicians introduced him to it.
“Being kind of a skeptic, by nature, it took them, oh, four or five educational meetings and five years to convince me that this wasn’t just a new form of snake oil,” says Pierce.
Pierce admits that he can’t guarantee that they will work but believes it’s a therapy worth trying. The Littles understand.
“It can take up to six months for those to really kick in,” says Caitlin’s mother, Jennifer. “They will last up to a year, but yes, we have seen improvement.”
A GoFundMe has been set up to help the Little family.