Hannah was confused.
Last thing she remembered was her college roommate and best friend Audrey Kubis taking her to the emergency room after a few days of being sick. When her face got some mysterious blue dots, her mom, a nurse herself, insisted her roommate take her to the ER.
While waiting to get checked in she fell asleep.
When she woke up she was hooked on to machines that were helping her breathe, several of her limbs were black and her family was more happy and relieved to see her.
What happened, she wondered?
Hannah had been in a coma for 12 days and her life had changed forever.
College girl
Hannah Reyling is the 22-year-old daughter of Paulette and Chris Reyling. She was born and raised in Saint Jo where she graduated in 2021. She has an older sister named Ashley who also went to Saint Jo High School.
An active child, Hannah participated in many sports leagues in neighboring Nocona. She quickly found out basketball was not her thing and gravitated towards volleyball.
“I don’t like when people touch me like in basketball,” Hannah said. “Girls are mean, so I just didn’t like the physical part of it. In volleyball, you don’t crash into each other, or you aren’t supposed to anyway. So I just like that about it. It can be very clean, but also very messy sometimes. It should have the same pass, hit rhythm to it and kind of never gets old when it’s executed like that.”
Hannah dove into the sport growing up and played on club teams. It paid off in high school, getting her onto the varsity team by her sophomore year and helping the team to the regional tournament twice in 2018 and 2020 as an outside hitter. She was named a Texas Sports Writers Association 1A all-state honorable mention in 2018 and was the district’s most valuable player in 2020.
She was listed at 5’8”, tall enough to comfortably play at the net at Saint Jo. Hannah also had a powerful frame that could put some oomph on her spikes, though more often she was looking to place her hits.
Playing for Coach Charlie Hamilton at the time, she and her teammates helped set the standard for what modern Saint Jo volleyball teams have risen to.
“I played with a lot of good people,” Reyling said. “In 1A, there are not very many setters that are very good, but all throughout high school I had really good setters. Just playing with people who had the skills and actually cared made it a lot of fun.”
Being at a 1A school like Saint Jo, Hannah of course got talked into playing basketball for a couple of seasons, threw shot put and discus in track and was a cheerleader some years. Still, volleyball was and still is her love.
That was my last experience with Hannah three years ago, covering her exploits in sports. Interviewing her in late July at her parents’ home, I never knew she wore glasses since she never wore them when she played.
Even with the success on the court, Hannah went to college to study. Initially she went to Texas Women’s University before transferring to Tarleton State University after one semester. She was pursuing a degree in nutrition, but was not sure on the career path.
After two years of college, she made the conscious choice coming into the fall semester of 2023 to start saying yes to more things and also to be more social beyond just playing intramural sports.
She joined the sorority Phi Mu, despite jests from her father about buying friends and it paid off big time for Hannah.
“Just seeing how the girls are all together all the time,” Hannah said. “I had friends before the sorority, but they were involved and I wanted to be more involved. It was fun and I met a lot of people through it.”
On top of college classes, she now was making time for sorority activities as well as working at a coffee shop/pizza place called Cold Smoke Craft House. She kept up with her love of volleyball by volunteering to assistant coach of a club team as well as intramurals. She even had the thought about hosting a summer volleyball camp in Saint Jo.
Hannah was busy, but loving life as things looked to continue this way at the start of the 2024 winter semester.
The illness
She was coming off a sinus infection from January, but felt good and healthy enough that she was playing in a kickball sorority event in late-February. Two days of sickness followed, with her feeling weak and throwing up. When she woke with blue dots on her face going to the emergency room immediately was a decision that saved her life.
“She’s filling out my papers,” Hannah recalls. “I was really thirsty and they wouldn’t give me water, so I just fell asleep. I woke up in Parkland hospital 12 days later.”
Her mother explained during those lost 12 days, Hannah was diagnosed with bacterial meningococcal meningitis and had purpura lesions that caused blisters on her arms and legs that went as deep as the bone. The infection affects the brain and spinal cord. While in the coma she was transferred to Harris Methodist in Fort Worth. Her body went into sepsis which turned her feet and fingers black.
Her family immediately came to the hospital when things took a turn. They were unaware their lives were about to change.
“She had to be ventilated on day two,” Paulette said. “They told us right away in the emergency room in Harris they feared for her life.”
The family never lost faith even when things looked dire 11 days later and there was little hope coming from the doctors.
“They came in and told us she probably wasn’t going to make it,” Paulette said. “She was still on a vent and not waking up. They were taking her off all medication to try and get her to wake up. They brought in the chaplain and everything so it was pretty emotional at that point for us that she probably wasn’t going to wake up. They told us she most likely would have brain damage if she did wake up because of the meningitis.”
The next day the family’s prayers were answered.
“She just, woke up,” Paulette said. “She wanted the tube out. She knew what we were saying, knew who we were. I mean it was just miraculous. We couldn’t believe it. It was like she was pulling a joke on the doctor, going no I’m not going to die.”
Despite her mental capacity being fine, her body was not. On top of the rough shape her hands and feet were in, her kidneys were in bad shape and she had to be put on dialysis several times.
She also was intubated several times which damaged her vocal cords and affects her speaking voice to this day, sounding as though her voice is hoarse after a day of yelling. Her inability to raise her voice causes her annoyance when she wants to tell her dog to settle down during the interview. She has been told the damage is not permanent and says it is much better than it was months ago.
Hannah was transferred to Parkland Hospital in Dallas since her mom said the previous hospital had not expected her to live and was not equipped to deal with the aftermath of her now black limbs.
Parkland has a burn unit and even though Hannah had not been burned, her limbs were not in good shape due to the sepsis. Eventually by the end of end of March, the difficult decision to amputate both legs, her left hand and most of her right fingers was made.
“My phantom pain was really bad in my legs,” Hannah said. “I would have sensations of my toes being crossed over one another. Not necessarily painful, but just annoying, to feel that and not be able to fix it. A pulling in my Achilles, sharp pains in my legs. It really just was super weird.”
She got to save her left knee thanks to many different things, including leech therapy.
Hannah also got to keep her right thumb, which she appreciates being right handed so she can still work and be addicted to her phone like a normal college age person. She excitedly used it to show me pictures of some of the things she described during the interview, including the leeches.
In all the total amount of surgeries, including all of the skin grafts, amounts to six. Her nurses and doctors got to know her so well, they threw her a surprise birthday party since she would be released only a few days before her 22nd birthday. She got to come home on June 19, 111 days from the day Audrey took her to the emergency room and now lives with her parents in Saint Jo.

To read the full story, pick up a copy of the weekend edition of the Bowie News.