A teenager was left unable to create new memories and having her memory “reset” every two hours after a crowd surfing accident went horribly wrong.
Imagine waking up every morning with no memory of the previous day. For teenager Riley Horner, that’s not just a movie plot – it was her reality.
When Riley was just 16 years old, she became trapped in her very own version of Groundhog Day after a freak accident left her memory resetting. The date she wakes up to every day? June 11, 2019 — the day that changed her life.
However, rather than having 24 hours to try and make sense of what was going on, Riley’s memory kept resetting every two hours.
That summer, Riley had been attending an FFA convention in Springfield, Illinois. The event featured a dance social for the teenagers – but the fun night soon ended in tragedy for Riley after she was accidentally kicked in the head by a crowd-surfer.
After being taken to a nearby hospital, Riley was discharged, with mom Sarah Horner revealing that doctors said she’d be “fine”.
“Once we picked up Riley, she started having seizures in our backseat and obviously we knew she was not okay,” mom Sarah explained, adding that her daughter would experience around 30 to 45 seizures over the next few hours.
What followed was a traumatic brain injury that has left her with a memory span that resets every two hours. Now, every morning, she wakes up thinking it’s still June 11.
Speaking to Fox 13 at the time, Riley said: “It’s like I’m broken. It’s just like, what? What happened?”
‘Anything that I’ve been through recently, it’s just not there and so when people talk about it it’s just really, it’s so confusing because it didn’t happen to me,” she said. “I’m not the same Riley.”
Riley describes the experience as terrifying. “I have a calendar on my door, and I look and it’s September, and I’m like, ‘Whoa,’” she explained to WQAD 8. It’s hard for her to grasp that months have passed since the accident because, in her mind, it’s always the day after her injury.
To keep her on track, Riley kept a series of notes and set an alarm to go off every two hours to remind her of what had happened. “I’m not making memories,” Riley said. “And I’m really scared.”
“I have notes on my phone, when I got up this morning there’s like thousands of notes,” Riley said.
In the months after Riley’s accident, her parents took her to five different hospitals – each one unable to definitely say what was wrong with Riley and how long she’d be without her memory.
“They tell us there’s nothing medically wrong,” Sarah told WQAD 8. “They can’t see anything. You can’t see a concussion though on an MRI or a CT scan. There’s no brain bleed, there’s no tumor.”
What’s more, some doctors feared that Riley would never be able to regain her memories.
However, fortunately, that wasn’t the case.
Five months after the incident, Riley was given a beacon of hope by Cognitive FX – a post-concussion treatment center in Provo, Utah.
Per Fox, mom Sarah described the clinic as the family’s “miracle in the mountains”.
Dr. Mark Allen – a clinical neuroscientist at Cognitive FX – was Riley’s doctor, and said of her unique case: “It’s just basic science applied properly”.
After learning that Riley had suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and that there had been a “break down” in the “communication system” in Riley’s brain that helps store memories, Dr. Allen said: “It’s fixable and it’s really a minor issue, but it leads to major problems,” Allen continued. “The ultimate goal is to get the system back online.”
Despite multiple therapy sessions, Riley was still having trouble forming memories and couldn’t remember why they were in Utah…
…that was, until day 154 of her memory loss.
When mom Sarah asked Riley why they were in Utah, the teen replied: “For a doctor. It’s at Cognitive.”
And thanks to her incredible treatment over the years, Riley is now able to live a normal life.
According to her Instagram page, she graduated high school and now attends Bradley University, where she ended her first semester with a 4.0 in nursing.
However, in a GoFundMe update in 2022, mom Sarah explained that Riley was still suffering from seizures, but had been placed on an epilepsy treatment plan.