EAGLE — “Check out my sweatshirt.”
The back of Kailyn Forsberg’s checkered hoodie reads: “The Struggle Is Real.”
And constant.
Nothing has been easy for the 15-year-old since April 7, when she landed on her neck after backflipping in Copper Mountain’s terrain park.
That was the day she last skied. The last day she walked. The last day she moved her legs.
She battled through three months of intense rehab at the renowned Craig Hospital in Englewood. Back home in Eagle, she’s still fighting as she transitions into a new life on wheels. She keeps hope alive that she will someday walk again. Mostly she cradles that hope at night, as she wiggles her left big toe. On a good night, she will spend hours moving that toe. Sometimes all her toes light up in pain. She says it’s like when her feet would defrost after a cold day on the hill.
“You act like it doesn’t hurt, but that’s impossible. Sure, the doctors say that pain is good, but it’s still pain,” she says, noting how the fiery tingle means nerves are firing, finding new pathways to navigate her mangled spinal cord. “I definitely have hope. At Craig, there were so many people, they didn’t have anything when they got there, but then they started to get stuff back after, like, two years.”
Some days are good: deer hunting in Utah, learning to drive her dad’s truck and, the best yet, spinning an Arctic Cat UTV through new snow up Hardscrabble Mountain near her home.
More days are bad: alone in her house, too ill to attend school, watching daytime TV and burying dark emotions as the future weighs heavy.
“Sometimes, it’s like ‘OK, this really sucks,’ ” she says. “It’s the same low point as usual. No stopping it, really.”
The gloom reached an apex in September. She was skipping a lot of school, dealing with medical issues related to her paralysis. She was lobbying for home schooling while her dad, the principal at Gypsum Elementary, pushed her to get back to her teenage life at Eagle Valley High.
“She needs that social setting,” says Mitch Forsberg. “She can’t be inside all day long.”
Then her close pal, Sam Jackenthal, died Oct. 1, succumbing to a head injury after a skiing accident at Australia’s Perisher ski area. Sam was a top-ranked freeskier, just like Kailyn. Both were up-and-coming juniors, harvesting medals in halfpipe and slopestyle contests.
The day before Kailyn’s accident, Sam was cheering as she stuck a 270-degree spin on the downtube to win a silver medal in the rail contest at the USA Snowboard and Freeski Association’s national championships at Copper. A photo of that monster trick hangs in Kailyn’s room.
Mitch still keeps a video of his girl’s silver-medal performance on his phone. “Just watching Kailyn trying to stay on his heels through the night skiing zone was pretty awesome.”
Kailyn went to Sam’s memorial service in Park City, Utah, last month. It was her first big trip since the crash. She was sad but torn by the realization that she could have easily suffered a similar fate.
“He was just having fun. It’s a risk of skiing, I guess,” she says. “It’s weird, but, at the funeral, it made me feel kind of lucky.”
Loving a chance to help
Kailyn helps out three days a week at an after-school program at her dad’s school. Last week, the kids were building vehicles out of Lego-like kits.
A little girl comes up and asks Kailyn for help with a piece of plastic. Kailyn likes to say she’s not a fan of kids — “They are so loud all the time” — but seems to relish a chance to help.
Teacher Lauren Mill approaches Kailyn afterward. It’s time for a talk.
Kailyn often shows up late. Some days she doesn’t show up at all. The teachers who run the after-school program want to sit down and set guidelines for the job. They want her to take this work more seriously.
“I’m over it,” says Mill, giving Mitch a glance.
He smiles. He’s glad to have someone else pushing his daughter, holding her accountable. The wheelchair can’t always be an excuse.
“We are going to sit down and go over our expectations,” Mill says later. “Maybe she just needs a little more guidance.”
Mill sometimes senses that Kailyn is coasting, on a sort of post-accident honeymoon, where she can roll without trying too hard.
“Why wouldn’t she cruise if she knows she can get away with it?” Mill wonders.
Sometimes the little kids come up and ask Kailyn about her injury. She tells them exactly what happened and that she can’t walk. She talks to the elementary school students the same as she does adults or friends. There’s no sugar coating.
“I think it is pretty awesome that she can open up about what happened and answer questions from students without a filter,” says Brittany Rivera, the Gypsum Elementary teacher who runs the after-school program. “She seems to me to be a very good role model. The kids look up to her.”
There’s no question that 10-year-old Kiara looks up to her big sister. Kiara can’t really talk to Kailyn without touching her. A couple of fingers on her knee. A hand under her leg. Stroking her hair.
“She’s really warm,” says Kiara, explaining the constant contact.
It’s more than warmth, though. Kiara works every night to find an excuse to sleep downstairs in bed with her sister. She doesn’t like sleeping in her room upstairs, even though Mitch repainted and added some new furniture — a way to keep pace with the completely renovated, wheelchair-friendly downstairs, which is known as Kailyn’s Crib.
The sisters are very close. Kailyn teases her, calling Kiara “my little slave.”
Kiara has developed a servant’s heart when it comes to her big sister. She jumps every time Kailyn needs help. Which is often.
Kailyn was in her bathroom one night last week when she hollered for Kiara to help. Kiara, forgetting her new role, quickly answered that she was busy eating. But as soon as the words left her mouth, she snapped back to her reality as vital assistant.
“Oh, hold on a second,” she says, leaping up from the table.
“I like to help her. She needs me,” Kiara says a few minutes later.
An independent kid
Kailyn is an independent kid. She has always been fond of doing things herself. She was never keen on asking for help. That has changed. It had to.
When a visitor offers to drive her to school, she demurs. She has only climbed into her dad’s Tundra, using a strap that hangs from the overhead handle. Mitch offers Kailyn $20 to take the ride, which would keep him from having to leave work to go home and bring her back to her school. But she never takes a ride with anyone but him.
“You know you are so weird about that stuff,” Mitch says. “Why is that?”
“To save you $20,” Kailyn says, ducking the question.
Is it because she doesn’t like asking for help?
“I don’t know if it was really me being independent or that I’m just scared of people. It’s scary to just go up and talk to people. So, yeah, it’s hard to ask for help sometimes,” she says. “I was always like ‘I’m fine, don’t worry about me.’ “
That’s a big part of why she likes her crib, which is a sort of sanctuary. It’s one of the only places where she can hang without assistance.
“I don’t really need help in this place,” she says. “I like it like that.”
Look of angst on her face
Kailyn, a sophomore, has worked with Eagle Valley High administrators to arrange half days at school. The early mornings were hard. It takes her a long time to go through her routine, take her meds and get ready. The 12:30 p.m. start is easier, even though that means she will have to attend summer school to stay on track and graduate in 2018.
Rolling into the school office last week, Kailyn throws her head back, a look of angst on her face. She forgot the elevator key. She’s supposed to drop it off at the office at the end of each day, but she often forgets. Now she has two of the school’s lanyard-strapped keys somewhere back at the house. The secretary is not pleased.
“This is the only one left,” she says, handing the key over the counter.
Kailyn promises to return it and wheels to the elevator.
“It always smells like this,” she warns, maneuvering into the small, musty box.
In math class, she sidles up to a table of girls. She flips her neon orange Under Armour backpack on her lap and uses it as a desk. Mr. Unkert is showing 30 students how to graph quadratic functions. There’s a quiz the next day.
Kailyn leans into her table and asks the fellow students a question about the math problem. They answer in Spanish. They are laughing, so it doesn’t seem to be anything about quadratic functions or the First-Outer-Inner-Last strategy that Unkert is teaching for solving the complicated math problem.
“I never understand anything they are saying. I like them, though. They laugh a lot,” Kailyn says later.
In English, Kailyn writes a short story using the week’s vocabulary words. In world history, she learns about Egypt. Later that afternoon, she wonders how much of what she’s learning will be useful later in life.
“I’ll be at a monoski competition and be like, ‘Oh wait, let me graph this quadratic function really quick.’ Right,” she says, twisting her mouth into a smirk that is one of her signature looks.
That’s one of the few times Kailyn has hinted at her goals or aspirations. Asked specifically about her future, she often diverts, talking instead about reaching the next level on a video game or plotlines in her favorite TV shows.
But she’s eager to get back on the hill. Her eyes light up when she talks about winter.
“I love the silence of fresh snow,” she says.
Switching to ski mode
It’s easy to suspect that the season’s first snowfall would be a downer for Kailyn. For skiers, that first powder coating is a signal to switch to ski mode.
Despite the chair, Kailyn is making the switch.
Kailyn has spent most of her life identifying as a skier. She was incredible, floating lofty backflips — her signature stunt — and winning medals on her unwavering march toward being a pro freeskier.
She still thinks of herself as a skier. She’s just going to switch rides, moving from her feet to a seat. She’s plotting with a few of her Craig Hospital friends about days on the hill. She has heard that the transition is much easier with a good coach. She’s ready. Skiing seems to be one of the few things that fires her up. It always has.
“I’m so stoked for the snow,” she says. “I can’t wait to ski. I’m going to be a monoskier.”
Alana Nichols was heading to college to play softball when she broke her back after hitting a jump on a snowboard 15 years ago. Since then, she has become and the first American female to win gold medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
Today, she tours the world as a professional athlete, skiing, kayaking and surfing. She urges Kailyn to keep an open mind during those first days in a sit-ski.
“At first, it was kind of disappointing because it wasn’t like it was before,” Nichols says. “But once I came around and saw it as an opportunity, a chance to be outside having fun, it was huge.”
Kailyn hasn’t really spent much time with athletes like Nichols. She should, Nichols says.
“It was a pivotal moment for me when I met other folks in a chair who had been where I was and had evolved into a person who was happy, and they had found freedom in so many other ways,” Nichols says. “Now that’s a mission of mine. To really show people what’s possible.”
It’s still too early for Kailyn to recognize or explore any potential upside to her injury. She’s still working through the unavoidable grieving process. She has lost a lot.
“When she’s ready, she will see there is so much to do and so much life to live,” Nichols said.
Elana Chase, one of , has no doubt she will rip in her sit-ski.
“What I personally have witnessed over this summer is a very strong-willed young woman,” Chase says of Kailyn’s recovery.
The Vail team has offered to help Kailyn buy a customized sit-ski.
“We felt it was important to encourage Kailyn to keep on living through the mountains she grew up in and have access to do so through the sport of sit-skiing,” Chase says. “Kailyn is a sports jock and has that athlete mind-set. That shouldn’t have to change.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins
Keeping up with kailyn
Kailyn Forsberg and her family are sharing her progress about rehab on at
