How WSU LB Kyle Thornton used his mom’s rare sickness to fuel his rise in Pullman

PULLMAN – Debbie Thornton remembers the rides down the hospital hallways the most. It was early 2015, nearly a decade before her son Kyle blossomed into one of Washington State’s most seasoned linebackers, and as she recovered from a rare disorder called Guillain Barré, she needed a way to distract herself from the painful tests at the rehab hospital in California.

Kyle, around 14 at the time, knew just what to do. When it was time for mom to undergo a spinal tap at the Casa Colina hospital in Pomona, where she spent a month regaining strength in her arms and legs, he would follow the same routine: He would slide his Beats headphones over Debbie’s ears, hit play on her favorite song – Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk, which had come out only a couple months prior – and push her wheelchair down the hallway.

“Kyle would always put his Beats on me so I could hear my song,” Debbie said. “He was real strong. He handled it real well.”

Kyle had a vague understanding of what was going on behind those closed doors, at least as much as a 14-year-old can, but the family was happy to be on the other side of the battle. Debbie had recently been released from the ICU, where she was completely paralyzed. The only part of her body unaffected, her face, was misshapen by Bell’s Palsy.

So for the Thorntons, husband Steve and children Kyle, Cameron and Kaitlyn, to be at this stage represented some real progress. Debbie was healthy her whole life. Only until the family took a vacation to Kernville to visit the Sierra Nevada Mountains did she come down with Guillain Barré, a rare autoimmune disorder that affects only 1 in 78,000 people worldwide annually.

Debbie’s absence from the family threw everything into disarray, pizza boxes piling up around the Thorntons’ in the worst days, but when Kyle was able to wheel his mom down the hallway, a certain hope lingered over the situation. After some time in the ICU, Debbie wasn’t allowed visitors, lest she get too emotional from seeing her loved ones.

Sometimes she got reassurance just from Kyle, and from those opening notes.

Doh-doh-doh, doh-doh-doh, doh-doh.

“With all of our guys, I challenge them to find your why,” WSU coach Jake Dickert said. “I think that’s it for Kyle. He’s kept pushing his whole career. Even now, we’re bouncing him back and forth, mike and will. Nothing’s gonna stop that kid, and I think it’s because of some of the adversities he’s been through, and also a lot of the successes that he’s had in his life.”

Kyle likes to joke about his long career at WSU, which started in 2019, when he accepted a preferred walk-on spot under the late coach Mike Leach. He first became a Cougar 30 years ago, he’ll laugh, smiling as he thinks about how old he feels. He’s 23, but compared to some of his younger teammates, he feels more like 40.

“Our team chaplain the other day, in our welcome meeting said, to the freshmen, the 18-year-olds, he’s like, guys think back five years ago when you were 13,” Thornton said on the first day of WSU’s fall camp in late July. “And I was like, five years ago I was here. So it kinda hit home a little bit and I was like, man, I’ve been here quite awhile.”

In that time, Thornton has authored quite the career. He spent his first two years as a walk-on, some nights staring up at his ceiling and wondering if he really belonged in Pullman. Then he was put on scholarship ahead of the 2021 season, and since then, he’s appeared in 37 games, 13 as a starter, leading the team in tackles last fall with 87 takedowns.

In the eyes of WSU coaches, Thornton is an emblem of consistency, an everyday linebacker they can rely on for tackles and leadership. He’ll start again this year for the Cougs, same as he did last season, helping lead the charge into a season unlike any other for WSU.

His mom’s sickness is nearly 10 years in the past, so it isn’t actively on his radar the way it was when he was still growing up in the Los Angeles area, but the lessons he internalized stick with him like a Band-Aid.

Mostly, he began to understand that even when he isn’t feeling up to it, he can always keep pushing, always keep pointing his teammates in the right direction, like his mom did for him when he was 14. He remembers the way Debbie still showed up for him in the hardest days, the way she still did her best to stay strong, even when her body failed her.

“No matter what you’re going through, there’s always a way to find enough of your heart to show love to other people,” Kyle says. “My mom, when she was going through what she was going through, it was like life-changing stuff for her, potentially forever. But she was still able to care about me.

“I think that’s just opened my eyes through all the troubles that I’m going through in my life, when something bad comes up during a practice or doing a game or during just life, not making that everything and still having enough care for my teammates, for my brothers. Just asking them, like, how’s your day going? How are things over with you? I think that’s something that’s allowed me to be the leader that I am.”

In that way, Kyle is taking the lesson to the best kind of extreme. At Washington State, he has always enjoyed generally good health, which has empowered him to extend a helping hand to his teammates. Debbie might have put on a brave face for her son, but it wasn’t as easy for her.

The sickness began in late December 2014, when the family vacationed for a few nights in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. That summer, they had moved from Arizona to California, so as they acclimated to their new home, they decided to see the sights.

Within a few hours after the family returned from the mountains, whose elevations hover around 14,000 feet, Debbie began to feel flu-like symptoms. The Thorntons spent Christmas back in Arizona, where she went on antibiotics for bronchitis, which is about as far as anyone in the family expected Debbie’s condition to go. She had never been susceptible to serious illnesses. How bad could it really be?

On Jan. 5, 2015, she began to worry a little more. As she was leaving the house to drop her kids off at school, she fell down the stairs. But she shook it off, and even a few hours later when her arms began to feel tingly, like they had fallen asleep, she figured she had a pinched nerve or something.

That’s about when her condition took a turn for the worse. She tried to talk herself out of feeling unusually tired in the evening – maybe it was just low iron, she figured – but she knew something wasn’t right when, as she tried to walk to the bathroom to get ready for bed, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t walk straight.

“It was as if I was drunk,” Debbie said.

When Steve drove her to the hospital, doctors told her she was struggling with stress and anxiety. In her mind, it added up: The family had just moved a few months prior. Her mother-in-law suffered a mini-stroke not long after that. Cameron, the parents’ middle son, suffered a serious BMX accident, and in the two weeks Debbie spent away from her new job caring for him, she was let go.

At that point in the night, though, the clock read 3 a.m. Debbie sent Steve home to get some rest and take the kids to school in a few hours. By that time, doctors had run additional tests and placed her in the ICU, knowing what was on the horizon. At one point, an ICU nurse stopped by and remarked to Debbie she looked in good condition for being in such a serious unit. What was she doing there?

“And I said, oh, Guillain Barré,” Debbie said. “She’s like, ‘OK, yep, we know what’s coming.’ So within the first few days, I went from being able to walk into the hospital to, I was completely paralyzed.”

“It was a pretty scary time,” Kyle said. “She went into the hospital, and we all expected her to be back in a couple hours, and she never got released. So we were like, what’s going on with mom? Like, we thought it was just the cold, and it took them a while to figure it out. Guillain Barré, something super rare. We didn’t even know what it was.”

Before long, Debbie could no longer talk, could no longer move at all. She could only find a few non-verbal ways to communicate with Steve. When Kyle and her children visited her at the hospital, she was completely conscious. She just couldn’t communicate with them.

“That’s what made it so hard,” Debbie said.

In short, that’s why the ICU nurses stopped allowing her children to visit her. It was too painful for Debbie. She had actually avoided the worst of the condition – it attacks the nervous system, often affecting the lungs, leading many sufferers to be intubated – but emotionally, she could no longer handle seeing her loved ones without being able to communicate with them.

Within a week, though, Debbie survived that stage and moved on to the rehab portion of recovery. That’s when another lesson Kyle took from the experience began to hit him: Watching the way his mom worked to get back to feeling like herself, taking rehab seriously, he understood the value of a powerful work ethic.

It was easy for Kyle to pick up on. Debbie spent almost the entirety of weekdays at Casa Colina, relearning how to walk, how to talk, how to use her arms normally. She began to resent Saturdays and Sundays because the rehab facility closed on those days. Two days she didn’t spend working, she figured, were two days longer away from a normal life.

The more Kyle stood out as a high school player, transferring from Damien High School in La Verne to nearby Upland for his senior year, the more it became clear how much his mom’s experience had sunk into him.

Everyone who watched him play, from Kyle’s parents to the WSU coach who led the charge in recruiting him, acknowledged one thing: He may not have been the most athletic linebacker, but he was heady. Aways in the right place at the right time. Comfortable as a leader. Physical.

“Every time I watched him play, Kyle was always the guy that was making all the calls, getting everything lined up,” said Ken Wilson, back then WSU’s linebackers coach, now with the same job at TCU. “So not only was I recruiting Justin (Flowe), who was a really highly-recruited guy, but I was recruiting Kyle, who I really enjoyed, how he went about the game and how he played, how tough he was.”

In that way, there is a line connecting Debbie’s experience to Kyle’s rise, a direct correlation between the way she worked to recover from a rare disorder to the way he has flowered into one of WSU’s most tenured players.

In the background, one song has hummed along.

Don’t believe me, just watch.

“I think it really shows up in my leadership and just characteristics of myself that I’ve come to show,” Kyle said, “I believe, have really come from that growth and from that event in my life, and I think I was able to turn it into a positive thing.”