A teenager's long journey of hope

The entire house was asleep when Kelsey Fey awoke in the late afternoon. The children in the day care her mother, Michelle, operated from home were all down for a nap.

Kelsey lumbered to the bathroom, her back screaming for relief from the pain that had hounded her for more than a week. An emergency room doctor had diagnosed her with a sprain the day before and prescribed a pain reliever and muscle relaxant.

She found the pills in the bathroom and then shuffled back to her bedroom. When Kelsey tried to step over a sleeping boy, she fell.

Unable to get back up, she crawled to her bedroom. When she finally made it, she tried to pull herself up but couldn’t even hoist herself onto the bed. Her legs refused to move.

That’s when Kelsey started screaming.

Until last summer, Kelsey had been a normal, active 17-year-old girl. She enjoyed running, shopping and spending time with her friends.

Her life turned upside down in August during a road trip to Iowa. She and her parents piled into the family’s Ford Expedition the morning of Aug. 11, bound for her grandparents’ 50th anniversary party.

Their first stop was in Sturgis, S.D., for the annual motorcycle rally, where Kelsey’s father, Brian, planned to meet a friend from high school. Kelsey slept for most of the nearly 24-hour drive from Kalispell, and when she woke up in South Dakota, she complained of a back ache and tingling legs.

“We thought she had probably pinched something in her back,” Brian said.

Kelsey’s back and legs continued to bother her throughout the trip. She took over-the-counter pain medication and slept more than usual. Not even the pool at their hotel in Iowa could tempt her to stay awake.

In the meantime, the tingling feeling spread to her hands and feet without leaving her legs.

“It was weird for me to walk, with the feeling of my legs being numb,” Kelsey said.

When the Feys got back to Kalispell late Aug. 18, Kelsey’s condition hadn’t improved. Her parents had hoped she would feel better after being out of the car and back in her own bed, but her back and limbs felt as bad as ever.

On Aug. 20, Michelle took Kelsey to the emergency room at Kalispell Regional Medical Center, where she was diagnosed with a sprained lower back. The doctor had found a knot the size of a baseball in her back, Kelsey said.

She was prescribed pain medication and muscle relaxants and sent home.

The following morning, Brian was up early, reading the paper in the living room, when Kelsey woke up and stumbled into the bathroom.

“I noticed she was walking real funny ... like an orangutan,” he said.

After she took a pain pill and went back to bed, Kelsey slept until about 4:30 p.m. Minutes after getting up to take another pill, she was paralyzed from the waist down.

“I didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “I was scared.”

A different doctor met the Feys in the emergency room. After hearing the whole story, he thought he knew what was wrong but wanted a second opinion. A spinal tap and neurologist’s consultation confirmed his suspicion: Kelsey had Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

The rare illness starts with a virus and causes a body’s immune system to attack its nerves, according to the Mayo Clinic. Weakness, pain and numbness in the limbs are the first symptoms; eventually they spread to paralyze the entire body.

Doctors don’t know what causes the syndrome, which is often but not always preceded by an infectious illness. Most people recover completely from Guillain-Barre Syndrome.

When she was diagnosed, Kelsey was immediately admitted to the hospital’s intensive care unit; if it isn’t caught in time, paralysis can spread to the lungs, and patients must be put on life support. Kelsey stayed in ICU for four days and then stayed on the medical floor for a week. She improved rapidly and started rehabilitation.

But two weeks later, the virus struck again, this time worse than before. The paralysis claimed most of her body, crossing Kelsey’s eyes and slurring her speech. She could move only her left arm — and that only slightly — and had constant headaches.

“She was pretty much a vegetable laying in bed,” Michelle said.

After Kelsey’s second bout with the virus, the Feys began to have insurance trouble. Brian’s insurance company would cover only 30 days of inpatient care.

“They said she wasn’t progressing very fast and they thought we would run out of time before she got better,” he said.

So they planned to move Kelsey to Brendan House, where she could receive an additional 45 days of coverage.

She hadn’t yet recovered; her eyes were still crossed and her headaches hadn’t let up. The day she was scheduled to move to Brendan House, a doctor gave her morphine for the pain. By late afternoon, Kelsey was struggling to breathe and ended up back in intermediate care, where she was hooked up to a heart monitor.

She stayed in intermediate care for three days, then spent another week on the medical floor. Finally Kelsey had recovered enough to move to Brendan House, where she remained for 13 days.

Through it all, Michelle rarely left her daughter’s side. She slept at the hospital, only leaving once a week to go home for a shower and to grab clean clothes.

Kelsey’s sister, 20-year-old Kaylee, quit her job to stay home with the day-care kids, and would occasionally persuade Michelle to go out for coffee. Brian visited daily but had to leave to work at Plum Creek Timber Co. and, on the weekends, at Montana Raceway Park.

Kelsey finally left the hospital Oct. 8. Her parents quickly realized their home on Empire Loop wouldn’t work for their daughter; no wheelchair could fit through the door frames or squeeze into the bathrooms.

They had planned to move into a house on Fifth Avenue East on Nov. 1 but contacted the owners, who live in Florida, to see if they could move in sooner.

“They were a godsend,” Michelle said.

The woman who owns the house is paralyzed, Michelle explained, so the place already was wheelchair-accessible. Doorways were wider, counters were lower and Kelsey could easily roll her wheelchair into the bathroom.

The Feys began moving into the new house the day after Kelsey got home from the hospital. That night, she and Michelle stayed at the new place. By the following weekend, they were entirely moved in.

In the meantime, Kelsey continued therapy and started thinking about school. Before Guillain-Barre had struck, she had been looking forward to her senior year at Bridge Academy and graduation in June.

Michelle stayed in contact with Bridge Director Teri Palmer the entire time Kelsey was in the hospital, and eventually Palmer started bringing Kelsey schoolwork. But the illness has set her too far behind; she found out this month that she won’t graduate this year.

“She is still getting credit for the stuff she is doing at home, but it won’t be enough,” Brian said.

The news was heartbreaking, Michelle added. Kelsey agreed.

“I thought I was just going to get better right away, just like cold. [I thought] I’d be out [of the hospital] in two weeks, and that never happened,” she said. “Then I said, OK, I’ll be out in another two weeks, and that never happened.

“Then it’s my senior year and I’m thinking, I’ve got to graduate, but nope.”

Except for therapy, Kelsey rarely leaves the house. She does homework, watches TV, sleeps and sends text messages to friends. The illness has been good in one respect, Michelle said.

“For all of us, you really see who your true friends are,” she said.

People have sent get-well-soon cards and offered to start a benefit account for Kelsey. Her medical bills are well over $500,000, Brian said.

But the family, while grateful for the offer, turned it down.

“We’re thankful that we have insurance,” Michelle said. “There are people who really need the support more than we do.”

Kelsey said her family has been her biggest support through the ordeal. But she’s still a normal teenage girl, and she misses doing normal teenage girl things: shopping, hanging out with her friends, even, she said, just walking around.

She misses, too, weekly golf dates with her dad; the two used to get up early on Sunday mornings, grab a breakfast burrito and golf.

But she is recovering faster than doctors expected and plans to be back in school by the time the second semester starts at the end of January. Then, she hopes, life will start to get back to normal — with one exception.

“I’m not leaving the state again, that’s for sure,” she said. “I’m never going to Iowa again.”

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by e-mail at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.