According to Kyleigh Williams, her mom always gets emotional when she’s talking about her daughter.
For a 17-year-old, that’s enough to elicit an eyeroll and a smirk. But Nikki Williams has good reason to be teary-eyed about Kyleigh, who goes by Ky—just a year and a half ago, Nikki wasn’t sure the teenager would live to see her 16th birthday.
This month, Ky is commemorating the one-year anniversary of her release from American Family Children’s Hospital in Madison after her double-lung transplant. Well, her family members are commemorating, Ky doesn’t talk about it much. “I try not to think about it,” she said, hugging her emotional support dachshund Hunner. “I just want to put it in the past.”
Ky had developed a severe infection from influenza A, which rendered her heart and lungs too weak to work on their own. She was put on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, also called ECMO, a form of life support that provides time for the body to rest and recover by doing the work of the heart and lungs. She also developed kidney failure and was put on dialysis.
She was listed for a double lung transplant on Feb. 1, 2023, and received the gift of donor lungs on Feb. 9, 2023. It was not a moment too soon, according to her doctors, who said she was one of the sickest patients they had ever operated on.
It took her months to recover after the transplant. She was disconnected from ECMO and dialysis in March, and spent the months of April and May undergoing intense physical therapy. In June, her feeding tube was removed, and at the end of the month, she was finally able to return home.
“When we were in the hospital,” Nikki said, “my brother-in-law came up to me and said we can never tell her ‘No’ because she had a double lung transplant.”
Although Ky says she doesn’t like to talk about the transplant, she’s not afraid of leveraging it to get what she wants from her mom and her dad, Jeremy. “I’m spoiled, but I don’t act like I’m spoiled,” she said.
She was able to attend classes during her junior year of high school, and even played a couple of varsity reserve softball games. Her mom remembers one game when she was playing first base, went running for the ball, and then fell a little because she was having a hard time breathing. But Ky didn’t want her coach to pull her from the game. “It was a little bit harder than I anticipated,” Ky said.
Still, she was able to hit many of the milestones that other teenagers look forward to—she got her driver’s license (she now drives a Jeep) and went to prom with a group of friends. Now, she’s excited about taking Advanced Placement biology and introduction to marine biology during her senior year. She wants to be a marine biologist.
In May, the Williams family went on a Make-a-Wish trip to swim with the dolphins at Discovery Cove in Orlando, Florida. This summer, Ky will be heading on a road trip with her grandma to Nashville, where they will be attending a family reunion.
The sky is now the limit for the teenager who spent Christmas 2022 in a coma. And her mother couldn’t be more thrilled. “If you would have told me a year and a half ago that she was graduating this coming year, I would have said I wasn’t so sure,” Nikki said.
