LYNNWOOD HIGH
After having open heart surgery two years ago, Kaleigh Ansdell, now 18, tries to look back on it as a positive experience.
“It’s made me who I am today,” Ansdell said.
As for the faint, pink scar from her surgery, Ansdell shrugs and says, “It’s me.”
Ansdell had surgery to replace her aortic valve, which was too small. Insufficient amounts of blood pumped through her body. Her hands and feet were constantly numb. “I always knew I had to have surgery,” she said.
A week after the surgery, around Christmas, Ansdell was readmitted to the hospital because she had fluid around her heart. She was prescribed inflammatory steroids. The steroids caused her to constantly feel hungry without feeling full. The dancer gained 30 pounds. The steroids cut down her muscle mass. Her cheeks puffed up. But the pills were her preferred option.
“I didn’t want anything else in me, I didn’t want a drain in there,” she said.
She was amazed at the outpouring of support and concern from her family, friends and school and dance teachers. Her mother slept on a couch in Ansdell’s hospital room and her twin brother admitted he choked up when he saw her in the intensive care unit.
After the surgery, Ansdell had to re-teach her body how to leap and position her arms for dance. Sometimes her knees buckled during practice.
“It’s a lot different being in that terrible place and to think back at one point I couldn’t get off the couch because I was too weak,” she said.
This fall she is attending Linfield College in Oregon to study psychology.
Ansdell’s interest is in how the brain works, and the opportunity to help people sparked her decision to pursue psychology.
“I like being able to read people,” she said.
At Lynnwood High School, Ansdell is the public relations officer for the Associated Student Body and is enrolled in three college-level Advanced Placement classes: literature, calculus and physics.
“It’s been a tough year,” she said.
Ansdell dances for the Trilogy Dance Co. in Snohomish. A serious dancer since she was 13, she studies ballet, jazz and contemporary, a combination of ballet and jazz.
This summer, Ansdell will teach dance and choreograph in England at her relatives’ dance studio, the Cowper School of Dance, in Whitehaven.
“I like music a lot and expressing myself through dance,” she said. “Dance is an art form in itself.”
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