Battling back: Team leader, fan favorite skates toward healing

Lynda Kinder was stunned when she walked into the Intensive Care Unit at Kalispell Regional Medical Center in mid-October.

The last time she had seen her son, Paul, he was heading to Detroit Metro airport to return to Whitefish for his third season with the Glacier Nationals junior hockey team. Now he was lying unconscious on a hospital bed, breathing through a ventilator.

“He was so bloated, it was just horrible,” Lynda said. “It was something I’ll never forget. He looked 10 times bigger, his hands and face were just so swollen.”

Paul Kinder, 20, was in an induced coma and battling septic shock brought on by bilateral pneumonia. His blood pressure was perilously low and his lung and kidney function was significantly impaired. The condition has a mortality rate near 50 percent, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Paul moved to Whitefish 2 1/2 years ago after graduating from Divine Child High School in Dearborn, Mich. He had met Nationals general manager Butch Kowalka at a tryout in suburban Toledo, Ohio, and was interested in helping the brand-new franchise get on its feet.

It didn’t take long for Paul to impress the coaching staff. His blinding speed could change a game’s momentum in the blink of an eye, but his maturity and leadership were what really stuck out to coach Joakim Falt.

“His leadership and work ethic rub off on everybody,” Falt said. “He’s got a great personality. He’s always happy, outgoing. He never says no. He always says, ‘Yes coach,’ and he gets the job done.”

Despite being one of the team’s younger players, 18-year-old Paul was named the team’s captain. Falt says it was an easy decision, but Paul was surprised. He thought Michael Noe, who was two years older and a local from Whitefish, would get the nod.

“He worked hard, he was always on time. He did everything a leader could ask for and I was actually really shocked that he didn’t get it,” Paul said. “But I told him, ‘Hey, it’s just a letter, you’re still a leader so don’t let it get to your head. Don’t let it affect your play at all.’”

That attitude shows why he was the obvious choice to wear the “C.”

Paul finished the season as the Nationals’ second-leading scorer with 34 points in 41 games, and was off to a terrific start the following year when injuries derailed his season. A broken wrist sidelined him for a couple months and when it finally healed he broke a finger. He finished with 28 points in just 18 games.

Paul returned to Whitefish last fall for his final year of junior eligibility and looked poised for a huge year.

In his first 10 games, he tallied nine goals and 13 assists for a league-leading 22 points before missing back-to-back games in mid-October with what he thought was the stomach flu. Several teammates had contracted a similar bug and Paul went to the hospital for medication to settle his stomach.

Two days later, Paul’s billet mom, Sadie Hergesheimer, came home from work and noticed something was wrong.

“Sadie came home from work and found him kind of unresponsive and he just wasn’t himself,” Lynda said. “So they took him into the hospital and put him into ICU, and it just went downhill from there.”

Paul struggled to grasp the gravity of the situation.

“I was expecting to go into the ER, get some medication, maybe sleep there for a night and leave the next day feeling better,” he said. “Then I woke up eight and a half days later seeing my whole family there with a tube down my throat wondering what happened.”

Paul’s condition terrified his coaches and teammates, who were certain he had played his last game for the Nationals.

“To be honest, I turned to God,” Nationals forward Chris Cutshall said. “It was hard. The first thing we did as a team was we came together and had a prayer. We skated hard for him that day in practice and we just stayed as positive as we could.”

Cutshall was one of many who prayed at Paul’s bedside during the ordeal. Paul’s parents flew to Kalispell from Detroit and his grandfather made the trek from Florida. All waited anxiously as Paul fought to stave off the infection.

As Lynda tells it, Paul was put into a medically induced coma so his lungs would relax and allow the ventilator to work.

“They had to paralyze him because as his body was fighting it, his lungs still wanted to work on their own,” she said. “But they were in such disarray and so infected that they really needed to rest. It was putting too much pressure on his heart.”

Response from the community was swift, in part because Paul is popular for his exploits on and off the ice. When he’s not playing for the Nationals, he’s almost always at the rink working as a youth coach and referee.

This time it was the community’s turn to help him: More than $8,000 was raised to help pay his medical bills and his family’s travel expenses.

“We could not believe the support we got,” Lynda said. “We just never imagined that Paul made that much of an impact on people, and it makes us feel good that we raised our son the way we did. You always hope that he does good and you bring him up the best you can.”

After eight and a half days of sedation, Paul’s blood pressure stabilized and he was brought out of his coma.

“At that point I didn’t really know what was going on,” he said. “I was in shock. Once I started coming down from the medication and figured out what was going on, I was in deep shock at what happened.”

It was clear he was going to survive, but Paul was far from out of the woods. His weight had dropped from 158 to 116 pounds, his muscles had atrophied and tasks as simple as sitting up were painstakingly difficult. Playing hockey again this season seemed out of the question.

“I would try to sit up myself and I just couldn’t do it,” Paul said. “It was actually really upsetting, because c’mon, it’s just sitting up. Breathing was also tough. I was on the oxygen until about a day and a half after I got out of ICU.”

He was able to walk with a walker after intensive therapy and on Nov. 7 he was released from the hospital, 18 days after checking in.

A month later, he was back on the ice.

Paul slipped on his forest-green Nationals jersey for the first time on Dec. 12 and skated against the Great Falls Americans. His ice time was limited and he finished with zero points in a 7-0 loss, but the mere fact he was able to play was extraordinary.

“A lot of the doctors, they were actually shocked about how quick my recovery was,” Paul said. “They had actually never seen what I had before, but they’d done research and they said normally someone at my age would take six months for recovery.”

Lynda returned to Dearborn after Paul left intensive care and saw her son outside the hospital for the first time when he came home for Christmas.

“When he walked in the house his sisters and I were here and it was just amazing,” Lynda said. “I kind of lost it.”

The family attended church on Christmas Eve and Paul was once again showered with support.

“It took awhile for them to close the church because so many people wanted to stop and see him and make sure he was all right, because there were so many prayers going out for him,” Lynda said.

Looking at him now, you wouldn’t know Paul just survived a life-threatening illness that wasted more than 40 pounds off an already slender frame. He regained most of that weight and looks like the same old Paul. His curly, dirty blond hair hovers a few inches above his shoulder blades and his ever-present smile reveals a missing front tooth that was knocked out during a hockey game two years ago.

Hockey is still a struggle. Before he got sick, Paul was always one of the fastest players on the ice. Now his skating is labored and he’s playing wing instead of center, his usual position.

“It’s really hard to watch him out there because you can tell how he struggles because he lost so much weight and strength, and he’s trying so hard,” Falt said. “But time heals. It’s about time with him right now.”

Paul’s leadership, however, has made a big impact.

“He’s a man of many expressions,” Cutshall said. “In a moment you think he should be down, he’s happy. He finds ways to bring the team up. In the game of hockey, or any sport, we all have our down moments. When that happens, he always finds some way to be positive. No matter what happens, we look around the room and he’s got a smile on his face or he’s making a joke.”

Paul is confident his strength will return and hopes to play hockey at Adrian College in Michigan next year, but right now his focus is on helping the Nationals reach the playoffs.

“We’re going to fight as a team and put it all out there,” he said.