Cheerleader keeps spirits up
Piedmont senior continues to recover from spinal fusion complications
Sutton Lindley blended in with her teammates on senior night. Same blue and gold uniform with “CATS” across the front. Same white shoes. Even the same curled hair and big white bow.
But look closer, and you could see the differences. She carried a wound bag slung over her right shoulder, clear tubes from her back looping down, then up to the black pouch hissing and clicking quietly. A PICC line dangled off her right arm, too.
At halftime, she used it to administer antibiotics to herself.
“You're so strong,” Piedmont High cheer coach Kitty Stuber said that night, telling her what everyone else was thinking.
Sutton Lindley had a hole in her back.
Yes, a hole.
After having a spinal fusion to correct severe scoliosis this summer, the incision on her back started to open. A little at first, but more as the days passed. Over the past three months, there have been appointments and tests and surgeries to try to correct a problem that Sutton's doctors have never quite
been able to diagnose.
They don't know why her incision has continued to open.
“Watching her go through all this is the hardest part of sure,” her mom Kirby Eldenburg said.
Friday nights have become a reprieve. Even though Sutton only cheered with her teammates on senior night, she has been at every Piedmont football game when she's been physically able. She will sit in the student section or with one of the coaches. She craves that normalcy. But those who know Sutton best say she has handled this ordeal as well as anyone could. She has turned her wound bag into a fashion accessory. She has used the opportunity to talk to nurses because that's the profession she wants to pursue. She has seen the good in the bad.
“You know, I could feel pitiful for myself all day long,” she told her cheer coach on senior night, “but when I'm at the Children's Hospital and I see kids with cancer who are just way younger than me and what all these other people are going through, that puts it in perspective.”
••• Sutton Lindley has dealt with pain in her back for several years.
When she was 13 or 14, she was diagnosed with scoliosis. It runs in her family, so she always knew it was a possibility, but her case was severe. She had an S curve in her spine, her vertebrae twisting in a way that looks impossible.
It meant discomfort regularly and severe pain on occasion. Even though cheer could be painful — Sutton sometimes felt muscles rubbing on bone during certain tumbling passes — she wasn't about to give it up.
“I definitely think that keeping active helped a lot,” she said.
She decided to wait on surgery because she didn't know if it would keep her from cheerleading, something she's done since before she started kindergarten. She initially wanted to wait till after her senior year to have a spinal fusion, then decided she wanted it over and done long before she left home for college.
She had the six-hour surgery June 25.
“Everything went beautifully,” Eldenburg said. “It was amazing.”
Even though the coronavirus pandemic limited visitors and made being in the hospital difficult for Eldenburg and wife, Julie Lindley, who is Sutton's biological mother, Sutton breezed through the recovery. She was up the next day and walked further than most spinal-fusion patients ever dream about walking so quickly.
Even her scar was beautiful. It hardly looked like she'd had surgery at all, the biggest tell-tale sign being her tan line being higher on one side of the incision than the other.
That's because the spinal fusion made her 3 inches taller.
Eventually, Sutton went home to continue her rehab. It was there that she noticed a pea-size black spot near the top of her incision one day when she was looking at it in the mirror. She thought it might be a scab.
An appointment with the doctor was scheduled, and before Sutton went, the scab fell off. Maybe it had been nothing.
But then, things got worse. A hole developed on the incision line, the stitches and the skin pulling apart.
Over the next several weeks, the split became wider and bigger.
“They didn't have an answer for it,” Eldenburg said of the doctors.
Sutton spent nearly a week in the hospital, and on Aug. 7, doctors decided to reopen her incision. They wanted to clean it out, take cultures to see if there was any infection, then stitch it back together again.
A few days later, the incision opened again.
On Aug. 17, Sutton had another surgery. Again, the incision was opened and cleaned, and this time, instead of using internal stitches that would dissolve and leave little scaring, the doctors used heavy-duty stitches.
A few days later, the incision opened again.
In the weeks that followed, Sutton went to one appointment after another. Wound care. Plastic surgeon. On and on the list went.
One doctor even suggested rearranging the muscles in her back.
“We'll just try this,” Sutton and her parents feel like they've been told repeatedly.
Because no one has been able to figure out why Sutton keeps having problems, the family feels it must do something. It has to keep trying. It has to allow different procedures. But that doesn't make it easy.
“This is our child,” Eldenburg and Lindley have said. “This is our child that you're trying all this stuff on.”
About a month ago, Sutton's doctors decided to try twice-a-week surgeries. Every Monday and Thursday for three weeks, they would clean the incision in hopes of eliminating any chance of infection and stretch her skin so that no more skin grafts would be necessary.
During the fourth of those surgeries last Thursday, doctors sewed her muscles together to give her skin something to grow on. They decided she would only need one more surgery, which happened Monday.
“They closed me all the way up,” she said. “I'm feeling good right now.”
Now, the waiting begins.
••• Sutton Lindley doesn't know if her incision will open again. Doesn't know if she'll need to have more surgeries. Doesn't know if she'll have to start wondering again when this whole ordeal will be behind her.
Regardless, she knows she'll still be part of Friday night lights.
Being at Piedmont's football games isn't always easy, neither physically nor mentally.
“That's been really hard … seeing all my friends be able to do what I've been doing since I was in seventh grade,” Sutton said.
But she will endure those fleeting feelings to get to do something normal like go to a high school football game. There's joy in the normalcy. There's fun in the routine.
That's why she had to be there on senior night. Because it was more than a month ago, she wasn't in as good a place physically as she is now. She asked her doctor to be cleared for a few hours so she could go to the game.
Thing was, she probably would've gone regardless of what he said.
“She's just so strong,” Stuber, the cheer coach, said. “I knew she was before all of this, but now, I don't know how anyone could be going through what she's going through and not just totally lose it.”
Sutton and her family say the support of others has helped. They've gotten so many offers of help and messages of love from Piedmont as well as other places. The cheer team from Yukon, for example, sent a gift-card basket.
“I knew that a lot of people loved her and us and our family,” Eldenburg said, “but it has been overwhelming how amazing people have been.”
No one, though, has been more amazing than Sutton.
There've been few complaints and even fewer tears.
She has even found a silver lining in all of this; she wants to be a nurse, so she has asked all sorts of questions to her doctors and nurses.
“It's been super cool to learn,” she said with a smile.
Even with a hole in her back, her spirit has remained intact.