Leslie gudel phillies

Kendall Kemm didn’t know how to tie balloons until her neighbor taught her on an October night in 2014. Having finally mastered the trick, the 10-year-old sat happily for hours, blowing up balloons for her mother’s Halloween party and artfully knotting them. By night’s end, she’d lost sensation in her hand but went to bed unconcerned, chalking it up to overdoing her newfound skill.

But in the morning, Kendall was weirdly uncoordinated, her hand still not right and now her foot was suddenly not cooperating. Kendall went to walk to her desk, where she’d laid out her softball uniform the night before, and she stumbled. She near face-planted while retrieving a bottle of water from the fridge. She casually mentioned it all to her mother, Leslie Gudel, as the two drove to a softball tournament. “I don’t mean to complain, but my foot isn’t working’’ is how Leslie remembers Kendall phrasing it.

By then, Leslie was in the first stages of a career pivot. Hired in 1997 with the launch of Comcast SportsNet, she debuted as a pioneer, the first full-time female sports anchor in Philadelphia history. However, the shelf life for such a gig isn’t endless, and by 2014 Leslie worked as the network’s Phillies reporter, after asking her bosses to reduce her role after she created her own small business. The practical Leslie understood how these things went, and she held no bitterness. She loved baseball, so the new job suited her professionally. It also allowed her more time with her children, Kendall and her younger son, Chase.

Her offseason weekends were often filled, just like the one on Saturday, October 25, 2014, with Leslie chauffeuring her daughter to a tournament. Though she was still in elementary school, Kendall already dreamed big when it came to softball. She wanted a Division I scholarship, and she committed herself fully to the practices, clinics, and tournaments necessary to achieve it. “It was my whole life,” Kendall says.

By dinner time that evening, Kendall’s whole life changed forever. So did her mom’s.

While Kendall’s Crusade didn’t become an officially registered nonprofit until 2016, it was born that October day in 2014, as Leslie feverishly tried to find answers after doctors explained to her that her 10-year-old daughter just had a stroke.

Life on the Edge

If you’ve ever tried to untangle a web of Christmas lights, you have a working knowledge of an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. They’re a maze of jumbled blood vessels that though unnecessary to live, can be deadly. They mess up the normal blood flow—where arteries take oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the brain, and veins carry the oxygen-depleted blood back to the lungs and heart. More troublesome in their jumble, they often weaken but typically go undetected until a catastrophic rupture causes a hemorrhage, or in Kendall’s case,
a stroke.

In hindsight, Leslie and Kendall have surmised that all of that balloon blowing put the pressure on Kendall’s AVM, causing it to burst. In all likelihood, the bleed started while she slept. But as Leslie drove to the softball tournament, she knew none of this. She almost nonchalantly asked a friend to check on Kendall’s suddenly balky left leg. Only after that friend ran her fingers down her shin and Kendall said it felt different did mother and daughter hightail it for a nearby hospital. By the time they got to the parking lot, Kendall couldn’t walk unassisted.

In the ER, Leslie overheard a nurse describing Kendall’s condition, repeating something about a flat left eyebrow. So she called up a friend who was also a neonatal specialist and relayed Kendall’s symptoms. He warned her to brace herself for bad news. Soon Kendall was in an ambulance bound for A.I. duPont Children’s Hospital in nearby Wilmington, Del. After doing an MRI on Kendall’s brain, doctors explained that Kendall had an AVM. “The first words out of one doctor’s mouth was, ‘It’s a rat’s nest in there,’” Leslie says.

After Kendall spent 12 days in the hospital recovering from the stroke, the doctors saw little hope for ridding Kendall of the AVM.“They basically told us to go and live our lives, that if they did anything, it would leave her devastated,’’ Leslie says.

Kendall is now 17, a high school senior, applying for college. She does not have the use of her left arm and has a hitch in her left-footed giddy-up but she has played softball anyway, and recently taught herself how to play golf with one arm.

Kendall is far from devastated. Her AVM is now 95 percent gone. Her doctors at Stanford University obliterated the AVM to near extinction, but they only got there thanks to Leslie’s determination and the gracious strength of a young woman who didn’t know how tough she was until she had to be.