Rosary grad Schalz on the way back

As a college senior-to-be, Kylie Schalz is many years removed from writing those “What I did on summer vacation” papers.

But what a story she could write. After completing her junior softball season, the daughter of Marmion and Rosary swim coach Bill Schalz went for a relatively routine back surgery to attempt to resolve a worsening scoliosis issue in her back.

But when she woke up, the questions she was being asked weren’t the ones she’d expected — they were asking if she had feeling in various extremities.

And the thing was – she didn’t.

“I realized I couldn’t move anything from the chest down and what I felt was that I was just numb,” Schalz said.

Kylie Schalz has been a high-profile athlete since her volleyball-softball playing days at Rosary and she has been a standout player for Oakland (Mich.) University for the last three seasons. She appeared in 41 games this past spring.

Now there were worries she’d walk again, let alone step into the batter’s box.

“It was supposed to be an easy surgery,” Schalz said. “My surgeon’s done 1,800 of these surgeries and not had the complication I had.”

To jump ahead three months to where she is today is to see Schalz back home after a summer in various medical beds in Chicago. She’s walking again with the help of orthotics and she’s still in intensive therapy with an eventual goal of not just walking without aid but of playing her senior season in 2013 after a redshirt year next spring.

Saying all that, however, is jumping past what happened since that June 8 surgery and to miss what happened not just to Kylie and her family but also to a previously unknown group of supporters, all of whom worked this summer to help provide a support system, people who, without any sense of jokes, had Kylie’s back.

“It’s been quite a whirlwind,” Schalz said. “It got turned upside down. It’s been a crazy ride but it’s changed our family for the better and made us closer.”

Kylie’s saga began when she went for surgery to attempt to straighten her back. The planned procedure involved holes being drilled in the vertebrae and insertion of rods to straighten a back that was curved at around 55 percent — with a goal of improving that curve to perhaps 10 percent.

During the surgery at Downers Grove’s Good Samaritan Hospital, neural sensors stopped picking up any activity from her spinal cord to her feet. When the reality she was paralyzed became known, the surgery was stopped and Kylie was moved to Intensive Care. After eight days, she was transferred to the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) in downtown Chicago.

“The first thing you think is ‘will she walk again?’” Bill Schalz said. “You wonder if she will regain feeling in her legs. She had no feeling below her chest. One of the first days she was in Intensive Care, she said ‘I don’t feel hungry.” I said ‘what do you mean?’ She said ‘I don’t feel.’”

When Kylie Schalz was moved from to the RIC, it took five people to get her into a wheelchair.

“I was thinking ‘how are Robin and I going to do it?’” Bill Schalz said, referring to himself and his wife. “Kylie’s a scholarship athlete at a Division I school. This is not something you remotely plan for. We figured she was going into the hospital to solve the problem and to not create a bigger one.”

What no one knew was how Kylie would respond as she began her recovery. You’d think sporting analogies would seem silly – but in a way, Kylie approached her work the way an athlete prepares for a marathon.

And this is where the really inspiring things start to happen.

“Kylie’s the toughest human being I’ve ever seen in my life as she’s done this,” Bill Schalz said. “She looked at this whole rehab through an athletic kind of prism. She had goals every week. She had goals to walk and to transfer from her chair without using a sliding board—which is how she moved from her bed to her chair. You name it, she had goals for it.”

From Kylie’s perspective, this was really to approach things.

“I woke up and made a goal of moving my big toe,” she said. “Now it’s to walk without crutches. If you don’t have goals, everything will seeme so distant that you’ll never get anywhere. But if you set little goals and make them, you have a sense of the success you’re having. You achieve your little goals and that brings you closer to your bigger goals of being at 100 percent.”

Through the summer, Kylie Schalz showed steady improvement and worked steadily toward her eventual return to her Aurora home, which took place last week.

“She just went ‘I want to walk out of here, I want to walk again and I want to play softball again,’” Bill Schalz said. “She just attacked it. She never had a ‘why me?’ moment. We told her to be ready for a setback, but she never had a setback.”

Although she has been an athlete in the public eye for a number of years, Kylie Schalz is actually a private person. So being told that her efforts were inspiring people were a little difficult to hear.

“It’s crazy how many people have been touched by my surgery,” Kylie Schalz said. “I’m just doing my thing. I’m not thinking that I’m inspiring people. I’m learning that my attitude is very strong and that I’m a strong person. I cried twice the whole time and I’m not giving up. It is an amazing story—I was inspired by other people’s stories at the RIC, and I can see that.”

Athletes are used to stepping in front of crowds. This was different.

“I’ve always been a humble person and this has been kind of overwhelming,” Kylie Schalz said. “I guess I’m kind of shy about this. When I was at the RIC, I didn’t want to be above anyone else. I felt that we were all there working together to reach our goals.”

People who were touched by Kylie Schalz’s story had a 21st century way of keeping track of her progress. Her parents set up a Web site through CaringBridge.org and updates were posted frequently. In return, people could post comments. Through the eight weeks, 537 comments were viewed by people who made 10,598 visits.

“I’ve learned that my family and I know a lot of people,” Kylie Schalz said. “It’s been amazing. I read it every night before I went to bed. I knew I wasn’t just doing it for myself. I was doing it for people watching. It kept me going in a positive direction.”

Actually, a number of the people who posted were ones who the Schalz’s had never met.

“People would write in and say ‘you don’t know me and your dad doesn’t know me, but our kids swim for XYZ Swim Team and we read about this or we heard about it, and we want you to know we’re thinking and praying for you,” Bill Schalz said.

Always a close family, the Schalz’s became even tighter during Kylie’s rehabilitation. Robin Schalz, who is the athletic secretary at Rosary, set everything aside to assist her daughter.

“I went to a couple of swim meets for a few hours and went to California for 36 hours,” Bill Schalz said. “But Robin lived and breathed this thing 24/7. If she had some work to do at Rosary, she would wait until 8 at night, go to Rosary and come home at midnight and then get up first thing so we coukld have breakfast and go downtown. She was utterly focused. She was a mom, first, last, only. She was very strong for Kylie. She doted on her, cared for her and advocated for her.”

Chris Schalz, the family’s son, works in Columbus, Ohio and rearranged his schedule as much as he could in order to support his sister.

“It was tough on Chris because he couldn’t be there that much,” Bill Schalz said. “He would work 10-hour days and then get on a bus at 10 at night that got into Chicago at 6 a.m. on Friday. Then he would leave at 10 p.m. on Sunday and he would get in at 6 in the morning and then go to work. He wanted to support his sister. They are close, texting each other all the time.”

In the center of all this was Kylie Schalz, who kept up her spirits through an ordeal that is still not over. The surgery that was stopped still has to be attempted again.

“I know that I’m going to have to have the surgery again and it’s a very daunting thought,” Kylie Schalz said. “But it has to be done, and I’ve come this far. I am hoping (the paralysis) won’t happen again, but it’s a scary though to have to go through it all again.”

Kylie Schalz’s is still on a pathway toward recovery. She has yet to return to school. She is still walking with orthotics. She has not attempted to throw a pitch. These are all things she hopes to do. She does, however, know the way that all this will move forward.

“I have to be positive,” she said. “If I’m not positive, I won’t get better. I put all the moans and groans aside. That’s the athlete in me,. I know that a little pain wasn’t going to hold me back.”