Surprise birthday for young man who’s faced death draws hundreds
He’s had 93 surgeries and nearly died earlier this year, but you wouldn’t know it by the beaming smile on Super Kyle’s face.
That restless grin was on full display Saturday night, as Kyle Humphrey wheeled through a set of black curtains into a surprise 25th birthday party attended by hundreds of his friends and family.
The top floor of the east-end Lone Star was packed with people all wearing the same black T-shirt. “No Such Thing As Can’t,” screened in white onto each, was the party’s theme — and has been Helene Humphrey’s lifelong message to her son.
Kyle was born with hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, and spina bifida, a condition in which the spine isn’t fully formed. He later was diagnosed with a Chiari malformation, which affects the part of the brain that controls balance.
He’s been bedridden for most of the past three years (aside from rappelling down a building in his wheelchair in September for the Easter Seals Drop Zone) because of a pressure sore, forcing him to put his studies at Algonquin College on hold.
In March, Kyle got a bad infection through something called a PICC line — a type of catheter inserted through the arm that brings medicine and nutrition to the area near the heart — and things looked bad.
“While we were in the hospital, I slowly watched him die,” Helene says before her son arrives, fighting tears. “I didn’t know what was happening, I didn’t understand, I just watched his body swelling up.”
She said the medical team was testing one antibiotic per hour, trying to find one that would stop the vicious infection.
She said she could hear a doctor talking on the other side of a curtain with a resident physician, saying Kyle’s organs were failing and that not much else could be done. Helene promptly let it be known how she felt about that prognosis, however, to the point that security was called on her, she said.
Eventually, she and the doctors made the decision to pump as many antibiotics into Kyle’s body as possible. They tried five drugs the next hour with no results. No change the hour after, either.
“This is not how he’s supposed to die. He’s supposed to live a long life and be miserable to me (she laughs), and get married and have children,” she remembers thinking.
Then, on the fourth attempt, as his body had swollen and kidneys shut down, something changed. Kyle started to get better. Eventu- ally, his mom took him home and kept pumping the medications into his body.
“In Kyle’s life, there’s no such thing as can’t,” she says. As a kid, Kyle would say, “I can’t,” when she asked him to do many of the same things she asked her other two children to do — make the bed, clean up toys. She says at those times she’d sit him down and have him write out the words with a pencil.
“‘Now take your eraser and take off that yucky T,’ ” she says she would tell him. “I can!” he would say.
The black T-shirts have that same yucky T, broken in bright red, next to Kyle’s motto. It’s on the front of a matching black baseball cap he wears, which has “Super Kyle” embroidered in red on the back. It’s now a message he shares with everyone around him, includ- ing longtime friend Max Keeping, and those he mentors.
“I tend to focus on family and friends who haven’t given up on me, and who have spent their entire life helping me understand that there’s no such thing as can’t,” Kyle says.
Kyle’s health is getting better, his mother says. He’ll have yet another surgery in December, this time to close up the wound that has kept him in bed so long.
Helene says she’d never met some of the people in the party room. When she was planning the event, she just reached out to those whose lives she knew her son had touched. Kyle says it’s “really special” to see everyone in one place.
“I’m seeing more and more as the night goes on, it’s amazing,” he says.