Kentridge water polo player recovers from brain surgery

The sport of water polo is demanding enough without recovering from major brain surgery. But Kentridge High water polo club player Spencer Kolke wouldn’t let something like losing a piece of his skull keep him away from his team.

After a month of ongoing migraine headaches, Kolke woke up one morning in September and plugged both the shower and sink and proceeded to flood the bathroom.

That was when his parents realized that something was wrong.

They took him to Valley Medical Center in Renton where the doctor suggested a CT scan. The next thing Kolke knew he was being rushed to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

The CT scan revealed a skull bone infection that had abscessed and was progressively cutting off oxygen to Kolke’s brain. He went into emergency neurosurgery later that same day and was unconscious for more than a day.

“I woke up not knowing I had brain surgery,” Kolke says, “and I woke up and they asked if I knew where I was, and I said ‘Valley Medical Center’ and they said, ‘No, you’re not.’ That was really weird.”

He spent several months recovering and after his family, it was his water polo team that was there for him.

A swimmer since the age of 7, Kolke swam for summer club teams and later Kentridge. It wasn’t until last year that he tried water polo and enjoyed the experience. It wasn’t just because he had friends on the team.

“Everything about it, it’s hard, it takes dedication to do,” he says. “I like to be active, I like competition, I like to win. So really working hard for that, it’s rewarding.”

But having friends and camaraderie was just as important. Having the team’s support after the surgery helped him, and he reciprocated that support by attending the majority of the games.

“Some people, they would have just quit, left and went away, but I stayed with my team ’till the end, ’cause they’re my team.”

Kentridge sophomore Sean Gilman is in his second year on the team but has known Kolke for much longer, having swam with him on summer teams.

“It was a real shock when he went into surgery,” Gilman said. The team found out about the surgery together at practice, but didn’t find out about the actual condition until details came in over the next several weeks.

Gilman called Kolke one of the team’s most important players. “He could play almost anywhere.”

“It kinda depressed the team for a couple days, we were all anxious to see how he was doing.”

Gilman said that replacing Kolke “was a challenge.”

Sophomore Jake Davies, one of the team’s fastest swimmers, said that Kolke was one of the only other sprint players on the water polo team, and his absence was noticed.

When Davies and the rest of the team heard about the injury, they imagined a broken bone or moderate illness.

“Then we heard he went to Harborview,” he says.

Kolke’s absence from the team was noticed, but it encouraged them more than anything else. Kolke attended a large percentage of the games, everything from their basic league games to the state tournament, and the team responded by taking eighth in state.

They found themselves working harder than years before to make sure that, even though Kolke had been robbed of playing the season, he wouldn’t miss out on a state berth.

“Because he didn’t get to be as much a part of it, we wanted to play well for him,” said Davies. “He switched to a huge motivator for us, an awesome cause to keep fighting for.”

Kolke is finalizing his recovery, including a hefty dose of antibiotics and home schooling. The weirdest part though is the hole in his head. During the surgery, doctors had to remove a hand-sized portion of his skull that was infected.

He’s had to wear a helmet when he goes around, as has spent the last quarter out of school. Later in January Kolke will go in for a final surgery to replace the missing bone with a synthetic plate, but for the time being he takes it easy and staying indoors recovering.

“I’m basically normal right now,” he says, “I just don’t have a piece of my skull.”