Kylee Mueller was 24 years old when she suffered a stroke on Oct. 17, 2023.
After being taken to Providence Medical Center in Wayne, she was life flighted to Avera McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
She was treated there until being moved to Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln on Nov. 9. That was her home until moving to Quality Living, Inc. (QLI) in Omaha on Feb. 5. She then spent six months working with staff there to re-learn all the basic life skills.
Her mother, Wendy, said the facility has six rooms in a dorm-like setting and those living there go to different buildings on the campus for different types of therapy.
Kylee was featured on a video produced by QLI during the month of May, which is Better Speech and Hearing Month. The video showed "the remarkable progress Kylee has made and focuses on Kylee's drive and persistence, illustrates the deep bond she developed with Zoey Bertsch, her speech therapist at QLI and the healing power of laughter."
Kylee was finally able to return to Wayne on Aug. 9 and is continuing her rehabilitation with physical and speech therapy.
Three of the therapists who worked with Kylee while she was at Madonna Rehabilitation Center were more than happy to share their stories with Kylee.
Natalia Nolting, MS CCC-SLP, Speech-Language Pathologist said:
“Kylee had such tenacity. She was very hardworking and very determined. She also had such a great sense of humor. If you got the privilege of hearing her laugh, it was contagious. Never a dull moment and very much a bright light in the hospital while she was here.”
“She came down from our LTAC unit down to acute rehab with challenges in swallow. So she was NPO (Nothing by mouth), receiving all medication and nutrition through a tube. She also had severely limited strength and some of those oral structures with lip and tongue and primarily use multimodal communication with gestures or her augmentative and alternative communication device to communicate wants, needs, requests and really use that to supplement in the meantime. We focused on using eye gaze, and then switch selection to form those messages, whether they were preprogramed, we worked together to collaborate, you know, those responses that she needed to quickly and efficiently communicate, whether that was positioning requests or requests for what she wanted to trial during our speech sessions, during swallowing, if she wanted juice or water or iced coffee or even, we would play UNO and she quite quickly could call me a cheater if she wanted to. So programing those meaningful communication interactions. And then as she progressed in using the device and was not as fatigued with it, she was able to use the keyboard and communicate complex interactions too.”
“She did still leave NPO, but we were able to start trial trays. So working on utilizing those strategies to help us swallow safely but also that endurance piece for across the entire meal session. And then in terms of speech, when she left, she was able to make soft approximations of various vowels and single syllable simple words and continued to be able to increase the resistance on her threshold pep device.”
Sara Hohensee, PT, DPT, CBIS, Physical Therapist said:
“So when Kylee came down to us from the specialty hospital, she was in a power chair, which she was doing a little bit of driving with, but definitely required a lot of assistance just to get around in her power chair. She had to overcome a lot of kind of increased muscle tone in her legs and her ankles and her feet, which is just part of her stroke recovery. But really, it was a challenge that she had to progress through, but did whatever we asked of her, even through all of that tone and the pain that she had. So she's a rock star.”
“For Kylee, we started basic with our standing frame just to get her up and on her feet and loading through both of her legs, kind of stretching her out. And we used our functional electrical stimulation bike on her legs. So we used electrical current to stimulate the nerves to fire the muscles in her legs using electrodes and using a kind of a leg cycling machine. We also had Kylee on our body weight support system. So using some bodyweight supported harnesses and some devices to support her body weight, to let her have the mobility, the freedom to move her legs about on a treadmill as we started progressing into walking to take off some of that body weight, to let her just focus on her walking. When she left, she was in a manual wheelchair that she was able to propel with both arms and legs. And then Kylee was also able to do some overground walking, which was super, super exciting. So she was able to walk with a walker, over 50 feet with really just one person assisting kind of.”
“I think because Kylee is so young and her how independent she was prior to her stroke and how active she was, that really aided in her recovery. I think we were able to really challenge her and progress her rather quickly”
Sarah Synek, OTD, OTR/L, Occupational Therapist:
“With Kylee, we focused a lot on her upper body and specifically working on just her distal strengthening and proximal strengthening, working on that fine motor coordination with her and just even getting any activation. And so when Kylee first came down from upstairs, she had very trace activation in both upper extremities. And so we were able to highlight her usage on the bike, the first electrical stimulation bike to really target all of those muscle groups on her upper body. And that really helped start to strengthen her upper body. And we saw a lot of movement in her hands and her forearms. And then we kind of transitioned to our Armeo®Power, which uses an electronic robot to eliminate gravity or add some sort of robotic support so that Kylee can really start using those movements functionally and really strengthening what we kind of used on the bike as well. And so through the usage of both of those equipment items, we're really able to target on the specific muscle groups and really help Kylee with increase in her fine motor coordination. And then also that gross motor coordination as well.”
“When Kylee came to us, she was very limited movement in her arms, cervically as well. And so she was communicating a lot through more blinking. So blinking one times for yes, two times for no. And then as she kind of started to progress, she was able to have a little more cervical control where she could flex and extend her neck. And so she could communicate with nods and shaking your head so you could ask "yes" or "no" questions, but as she continued to progress, it was so much easier to communicate nonverbally because we got to know Kylee as a therapist and we could tell if she was unhappy or if she was happy and if something didn't feel right, if she was in pain. And so just that was so important to just to build that relationship as a therapist and as a patient that we could get really get to know Kylee well and we could tell if something wasn't quite where it should be, if something was going really well, and how we can enhance those things just from that nonverbal communication with her.”
"She stills needs assistance with certain activities, but has come so far," said Wendy.
