Heart problems open new doors
When Kadi McKinley started her career at Cheney High School, she had hopes of playing on the girls basketball team and the volleyball team.
But during her freshman year, she began having fainting spells and couldn’t perform as well athletically.
Her doctors thought she was suffering from asthma attacks or maybe bouts of anxiety.
Soon they referred her to a cardiologist who found that she had a congenital heart defect. Her right carotid artery was wrapped around her heart and her blood wasn’t circulating properly.
Doctors performed open-heart surgery on Kadi her sophomore year of high school on Feb. 15, 2006. Part of her surgery required Kadi to be put on a heart-lung machine and she said she was clinically dead for three hours.
“I was really scared,” she said, just a few days before she is due to graduate from Cheney on Friday.
She said that up until then, she didn’t really appreciate how much she loved and needed her family. But support from her brothers, Tyler and Patrick Thomas, and her mother, Brenda Anderson, got her through the tough times.
“I just knew that everything was going to be fine,” she said.
Her recovery wasn’t easy. After she woke up in the hospital, she had many friends come to visit her, but soon everything became pretty overwhelming.
“Why am I going through this at 16 years old?” Kadi said she asked herself. She figured she must have been given a second chance for some reason.
She’s had two more surgeries since then and still has to take medication for her heart, has low blood pressure and arrhythmia.
It took her three months to recover from the surgery. During her junior year she tried to return to sports and even made the varsity volleyball team.
She just wasn’t well enough. It was a long time before she could even watch a girls basketball game at the school.
“I do miss sports,” she said. “It was really hard for me for a long time.”
Once she realized she had to let athletics go, Kadi turned to the music and theater departments of the school.
She had taken voice lessons in middle school and has always liked music. She became involved in the school choir and said recently that the choir teacher, Harlan Henderson, was her favorite teacher.
“This is one place where I can shine,” she said inside the choir room of the school.
She found that not being in sports opened up other doors for her. She met new people at the school and took up acting.
She played Meg in the school’s performance of “Little Women,” and Alice, the romantic lead in “You Can’t Take it With You.”
Kadi said that she had always wanted to act and the experience was very rewarding to her.
Along with her schoolwork, choir and theater projects, Kadi said she needed something to fill in the time she used to dedicate to sports, so she works three jobs. She’s a caregiver at Cheney Home Care, works as a nurse’s assistant at Cheney Assisted Living and also works at Hollister Co., a clothing store at the Spokane Valley Mall.
After she graduates, she plans to attend the Glen Dow Academy of Hair Design and later wants to attend Eastern Washington University to study nursing.
Kadi said the people she has worked with at Cheney Home Care and Cheney Assisted Living are special to her and it’s rewarding to help the very sick.
“I can relate to them,” she said.
And she is still active in music. She writes her own songs and enjoys playing the piano.
Recently, the choir took a trip to California, where they performed at Disneyland and California Adventure.
The students got a chance to have some free time in the theme parks and Kadi loved the roller coasters.
“I really felt it when I got back,” she said of the stress all the activity put on her. But she said it was worth it, since she got a chance to ride Space Mountain, a roller coaster that takes the riders around in a mostly dark space which makes it difficult to see what’s around the corner.
“I’m OK with not knowing what’s next,” Kadi said.