Laughter Is Still Best Medicine
Humor is not usually associated with open-heart surgery. After all, a patient’s sternum is sliced in half by a saw, and afterward, even with a morphine drip, the pain can be miserable.
So understand the dilemma faced by 16-year-old softball pitcher Logan Kinsey of Brentwood as she sat in her hospital bed last summer.
A benign tumor the size of a jawbreaker had been removed from the right ventricle of her heart. Her father, Lance, makes her giggle all the time, but his jokes were causing her pain.
“I had to kick him out of the room because he would make me laugh,” she said. “I’d be, ‘Dad, stop.’ ”
Thankfully, laughter replaced worries as family and friends fretted over Kinsey’s response to such an invasive surgery.
The answer came last month when she stood on the Brentwood softball field with her teammates, ready for the first day of practice.
She pitched every inning of every game as a freshman for Brentwood, which shared the Delphic League title and made the Southern Section softball playoffs for the first time.
She loves softball so much that she kept attending practice last month even though she had to have a surgical procedure to remove wires from her sternum that would sideline her for another week.
“Not every kid would decide to do that,” co-Coach Patrick Brown said. “She feels a commitment and passion for her sport. She has participated in every drill we’ve had. She’s gotten a lot of her strength back since the surgery. There’s been no restrictions. We’re surprised and pleased where she is, considering what she’s gone through.”
It was mere luck that a tumor was discovered in Kinsey’s heart. She had a fainting episode last August at a club softball game that was blamed on the 105-degree temperature. As a precaution, she was given an echocardiogram, which uses sound waves to create a moving picture of the heart.
It showed a tumor, though doctors believe it had nothing to do with her fainting spell.
A week later, open-heart surgery was performed at UCLA Medical Center because doctors didn’t want to take any chances by leaving the tumor untouched.
“It’s too bad we didn’t have an alternative way of getting it out,” said UCLA pediatric cardiologist Stacey Drant. “It acts kind of like a blood clot. If it became dislodged and had gone to the lungs, with the size of it, it could have killed her.”
The potential dangers were hardly on top of Kinsey’s list of questions.
“I was freaked out about my ASA team, about my high school team,” she said. “I had a ton of questions running through my head, but it was, what about softball? When can I get back?”
She cried because everything had changed so quickly.
“It was hard at first to come to terms with it,” she said. “I felt fine and felt like I always had my whole life. To know there was a tumor was weird.”
Kinsey spent five days in the hospital after surgery, then two weeks recovering at home. She couldn’t engage in strenuous activity for two months.
“My family helped me throughout the entire thing,” she said. “At night, before going to bed, I had some sleepless nights and thought about what was to come. Before, I thought about the negatives. Then I thought about the positives. In a week, I’ll be able to get up by myself. Then I realized how lucky I was and how I’ll never take anything for granted.”
In those early days, there were some positive developments. She watched a lot of television and was grateful her brother bought her the first season of “One Tree Hill” on DVD.
In school, she used a rolling backpack to carry her books.
Soon she started loosening up her arm, practicing from a couple feet away, then going back 30 feet and farther.
On Tuesday, her doctor gave Kinsey final clearance, allowing her to pitch again, seven months after her surgery. On Friday, she’s expected to take the mound for Brentwood’s season opener against North Hollywood Oakwood.
“She’s as good as new,” Dr. Drant said.
And that means her father can make her smile again.
“I can’t restrain myself,” he said. “I think a little pain is OK if it’s in the name of a good laugh.”
Eric Sondheimer can be reached at eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.
