May 7 started as a typical day for Kody Rolfe.
He put in a full day of work at Braun Northwest, helped a friend with some work at his house and headed to Thorbeckes Athletic Club for a workout. Rolfe, a 2021 Adna High School graduate and former football player, went to the gym six days a week for two hours with the goal of becoming stronger and healthier.
During this workout, Rolfe collapsed. His mother, Christina, received a phone call from him, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying during the four-second call before it ended. The phone rang again, and she still had trouble understanding him.
Christina eventually heard people in the background giving instructions to roll Kody on his side, to check his pupils and to call 911. She repeatedly yelled through the phone, hoping for someone to hear her amid the chaotic scene. Someone eventually picked up the phone and informed Christina that Kody had collapsed and that an ambulance was en route.
Christina immediately headed to the gym and arrived just as the ambulance did. She was told her son, her youngest child of three, was having a brain bleed due to either an aneurysm or a stroke and that he would be lifeflighted to Tacoma General Hospital.
Doctors discovered that Kody, 21 at the time, had suffered a severe stroke stemming from a previously undetected brain abnormality called an arteriovenous malformation (AVM). The AVM ruptured in the pons portion of his brain stem during the pontine stroke.
When his family arrived at his hospital room, doctors told them that they would be lucky to have an hour left with him. Kody’s family: Christina, father Brian, and older sisters Samantha and Taylor, were stunned, especially because Kody had always been strong and healthy.
“I always told him that, for his mental health, it was important to be physically active and to take care of himself,” Christina said. “He graduated at the end of the COVID era. His junior and senior years were pretty hard. When he graduated high school, his focus was getting back to normal and being healthy and strong and making a life for himself.”
The first 72 hours were critical, Christina said, as doctors were looking for brain life. Kody was diagnosed with partial locked-in syndrome, where the only voluntary movement one can make is typically with their eyes. But Kody surprised doctors by spending eight days in the intensive care unit while on life support, and as he emerged from unconsciousness, he started to show signs of full use of the right side of his body. However, his left side was weak and struggled to function, Taylor said.
“He became stronger and he became more communicative. As far as his personality and his wit and his thinking and communication, it’s all there,” Christina said. “He started communicating with his right hand in crazy ways. He memorized a whole letter board. There’s all kinds of things that he has done that’s moved piece by piece forward that have been far and beyond what we ever would have expected, especially beyond those first two days.”
Kody was transferred to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he spent 62 days. He underwent multiple surgeries and procedures and was moved out of the ICU during his stay. Toward the end of his stay in Seattle, he continued to show signs of progress on the left side of his body, including the flexing of his left bicep, the wiggling of his toes on his left foot and muscle contractions on his left thigh.
Kody was then transferred all the way to Chicago’s Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, a rehab center that Christina said is “the best of the best” when it comes to dealing with his specific diagnosis. But the family’s insurance only covered 30 days of rehab, when patients with his diagnosis need a minimum of 60 days to have a better chance of a more purposeful recovery. Taylor said after the 30 days, the Rolfe family was allotted a cost of $5,000 a day. The family is looking for financial support to give Kody the best rehab possible. As of Monday morning, their GoFundMe page has raised nearly $20,000 of their $50,000 goal, with 171 donors.
“It’s a day-by-day thing. His insurance maximum here is 30 days, so we’re praying and hoping that he gets the most back he can in 30 days,” Christina said. “Being in a hospital bed for 60 days, he has to really fight every single day. He has to be the strongest he can be.”
Christina has been by her son’s side nearly every day since May 7, while Brian, Samantha and Taylor have held down the fort at home in Curtis while traveling back and forth to Chicago. Samantha and Taylor both said the emotional impact of Kody’s hospitalization has been overwhelming.
“Kody and I are 21 months apart in age. We have always been very close, and some consider us to look like twins,” Taylor said. “We did everything together growing up and had a great bond. When I found out what happened, my heart shattered. Even though he didn’t die, it felt like a part of me was missing. To see him go from being such an independent person to lying in a hospital bed vulnerable broke me. Kody is the glue of our family, and it has been hard without him home.”
Samantha, the eldest of the three children, said her days are consumed with thoughts about her brother and how he is doing.
“Ever since May 7, my world has been turned upside down. His incident wrecked me. I am not who I am without my little brother in my life,” she said. “The feeling of seeing him lying in a hospital bed and potentially dying was one of the most heartbreaking and worst things I have ever experienced. Not being able to help him, hear his voice, listen to his contagious laugh, look him in the eyes, hug him, or ever hear him tell me he loves me again has been gut-wrenching, nauseating and crushes me still to this day.”
While in Chicago, Kody has continued to see tremendous progress through his rehab. Each day, he attends three one-hour therapy sessions, including speech therapy, physical therapy and occupational therapy. He has to relearn how to walk, talk, eat, and accomplish minute daily tasks. Through it all, however, Christina said Kody has been a warrior.
“He has been so strong and so solid through this whole thing, and I don’t know how because his whole life was literally pulled from underneath him for no fault of his own,” she said. “He has the best attitude, his humor is intact and he has such a fight within him. I always tell him that he has the heart of a lion. I just want him to be able to have a reason to fight.”
Christina said the support from the community has been overwhelming, not just through financial support but the prayers and positive messages. Kody’s friends and family packed the hospital waiting room in Tacoma and have been constant supporters over the last two months. In fact, when doctors were looking for purposeful movements in Tacoma, they were shocked to find Kody, his father and his friends “playing thumb war,” Christina said. Some of his friends stayed night after night and slept on the couch in the hospital.
“We feel so blessed to have our friends and our family and strangers and our community. In the beginning, all of the prayers were what kept him going,” she said. “When we were at Tacoma General those eight days, that waiting room was packed. It was packed from the minute we got there. Friends of ours arrived before we did, and then his friends, his cousins and his grandparents. It was a revolving door. We had friends that gifted us hotel rooms. We had friends that gifted us a week in a rental house in the area. We had people fly in that first week from Hawaii, from Pittsburgh, from Denver, from Oregon.”
The GoFundMe fundraiser can be found at https://tinyurl.com/bdzbsmb5.
