CHARLOTTE VINSON IS dying from toxic shock syndrome when she sees her grandma.
It's May 2024. Charlotte is 16 years old and playing the best volleyball of her life until chills give way to a fever. Her organs shut down. She is in Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis on life support.
Her grandmother appears. The woman who adored tulips. Who taught Charlotte how to bake. Who loved watching her play volleyball. When her grandmother's breast cancer returned, she vowed to live long enough to see where Charlotte would play in college. She died in July 2023, four days after her granddaughter committed to Indiana. But she's with Charlotte now.
"I was moving through lights," Charlotte says, sitting in the Indiana film room an hour before a November practice. "I was thinking I was going to die and accepting that fate."
PHIL VINSON HEARS the muted whir of a helicopter flying over the family's Muncie, Indiana, home. In his heart, he knows it's Charlotte. Somewhere overhead, his daughter is fighting for her life.
He quickly stuffs a suitcase with shirts, pants and toiletries before heading to Riley, an hour-and-20-minute drive away in Indianapolis. Charlotte's mom, Erin, is already on the road ahead of him.
It had been just three days since Charlotte started to feel sick. The Vinsons had gone to church that morning, Mother's Day, and then brunch. A few hours later, Charlotte couldn't stop shivering. Her fever spiked. By Wednesday, she was struggling to get out of bed, and she threw up when she did. Phil took Charlotte to see a doctor around 10 a.m. In the waiting room, she said something that terrified him.
"Dad, I can't see."
They rushed to the emergency room at IU Health Ball Memorial, where Erin, a family physician, met them. Charlotte's blood pressure was low, her heart rate high, her organs were shutting down. She was diagnosed with toxic shock syndrome, a rare and sometimes fatal condition most associated with tampon use. In Charlotte's case, the infection was caused by strep bacteria and unrelated to tampons. Paramedics loaded her onto a stretcher and boarded her onto the lifeline helicopter.
Hovering over the landing pad at Riley, the helicopter is loud, but Charlotte doesn't hear a thing. The sky above the hospital roof is bruised gray and overcast as Charlotte is wheeled in.
"From there," Charlotte says, "it's just bits and pieces."
Erin is still on her way to Riley when the attending physician, Dr. Courtney Rowan, calls. She wants permission to intubate Charlotte right away; there's no time to wait.
Charlotte's body has stopped sending blood to vital organs like her kidneys and liver and brain. Depleted of oxygen, her cells are dying and releasing lactic acid. Doctors do their best to stabilize her. They pump rounds of antibiotics and medication into her body to fight the infection and lessen the strain on her overworked heart.
But 24 hours later, on Thursday, Charlotte's condition worsens. She codes that night, and Erin scrambles to make sure Phil is in the room. Get Phil, she pleads. She knows he will never forgive himself if Charlotte dies and he's not there.
Dr. Rowan explains to Erin and Phil that Charlotte's best shot is to go on ECMO, a machine that will function as her heart and lungs, because her body is too weak to pump blood.
"Will she die?" Phil asks.
Dr. Rowan is compassionate but blunt. Charlotte could die on ECMO, but she will definitely die without it. The Riley doctors perform the surgery to insert the tubes that night in Charlotte's hospital room -- she's too sick to move into an operating room.
Three nurses are in the room at all times. One to monitor the ECMO machine, another assigned to the dialysis machine that acts as Charlotte's kidneys, a third manages everything else. One of the nurses braids Charlotte's hair.
Most of all what Charlotte's body needs is time. Family members, coaches, teammates and friends shuffle in and out of the waiting room down the hall. Someone prints photos -- Charlotte with her friends, Charlotte playing volleyball -- and hangs them on the hospital room wall so they are the first thing Charlotte will see when she wakes up.
THE REV. THOMAS HAAN is driving home from his parents' farm in Lafayette when he gets a call from his cousin Erin. As a priest, he is often on call; the church has an emergency line that connects to his cell. Someone is sick. There is an accident. A heart attack. Surgery gone wrong. Haan keeps his stole, prayer book and sacred oils in the glove compartment of his Ford F-150. Now he stands at the side of Charlotte's bed. He holds the black prayer book in his left hand, flipped open and marked with ribbons, oil in his right, and administers the anointing of the sick.
Through this holy anointing, may the Lord and his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
He gently anoints Charlotte's forehead and the palms of her hands.
May the Lord who frees you from sin, save you and raise you up.
Standing at the side of her daughter's bed, Erin rubs her rosary beads and prays.
Please.
Charlotte wakes up five days later. But not for long. She drifts in and out of sleep.
A machine breathes for her and she can't speak. Charlotte gestures for a whiteboard in her room. It's early still, and only Erin and Charlotte's aunt are in the hospital room. Charlotte takes the marker and writes. "Grandma." Erin thinks Charlotte is confused -- her grandpa was in the room just the other night -- but Charlotte is adamant. "All white," she writes. "I saw Grandma."
Erin cries.
It takes five people to help Charlotte stand from her hospital bed. One nurse at the front to steady her by the shoulders, three to support Charlotte from the back, a fifth person by her side to manage the handful of tubes and wires sprouting from Charlotte's body. Once she's standing, she's walking, marching around the hospital floor at a determined clip with IV and oxygen tank in tow.
The Vinsons pass hours at the hospital watching "The Bear" in Charlotte's room, closing the door because they are at a pediatric hospital and sometimes there is swearing in the show.
"Who watches TV shows together anymore? Nobody." Erin laughs.
"For almost two weeks, it was every day," Phil says.
Charlotte is discharged on June 11, 27 days after being airlifted to Riley. Balloons and pinwheels line the family driveway. A lawn sign reads, "Welcome home Charlotte."
THE YORKTOWN HIGH volleyball team practices in the school gym, and Charlotte sits on a chair on the side of the court. It's July, and Charlotte had been attending -- watching -- the summer workouts for a few weeks.
She's grown restless. Charlotte stands up and asks coach Stephanie Bloom if she can try to serve.
Please? It's just a serve, a motion so deeply entrenched in muscle memory that at the hospital, when she could barely move her limbs, Charlotte mimicked serves from bed, closing her eyes and imagining exactly this.
"In my head I'm like, 'This is a really bad idea,'" Bloom says.
Bloom tries to temper expectations. One week ago, she reminds Charlotte, you were using a walker.
But Charlotte walks to the service line. She throws the ball up in the air. Her palm makes contact. The ball lands 10 feet in front of the net. Bloom's heart aches. The gym is quiet. None of the girls know how to react. Charlotte is the best player on their team. As a sophomore at Yorktown, she led the Tigers to the state finals. She committed to Indiana the summer before junior year. She was a top-25 recruit -- one of Indiana's highest-ranked ever. Now she's struggling to serve.
"It rattled everybody," Bloom says.
Charlotte tries to laugh it off -- "Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing" -- but Bloom sees the realization dawn on her face. This is going to be hard.
"She was as sick as a human being can be," says Dr. John Parent, Charlotte's cardiologist at Riley.
She lost more than 20 pounds on her 6-foot-2 frame and was trying to regain weight while her appetite hadn't returned. Swallowing was still a delicate process.
Parent was frank with the Vinsons: Charlotte might never play volleyball again. Her heart was weakened from the infection and dealing with inflammation. There could be scarring, which would further reduce heart function. The probability of her playing again, at the level she wanted to, was slim.
"I would say less than 1% back when she was in the ICU," Parent says. "By the time she left the hospital, maybe 10%."
But this is Charlotte Vinson.
"I remember the first day she was allowed to stand," says Mike Lingenfelter, co-director of Munciana Volleyball, one of the top clubs in the country. "She's mad because she can't run. She can start to run, now she's mad she can't jump. She's allowed to jump, she's mad because she doesn't jump as high."
Charlotte made Lingenfelter promise he'd help her get back to where she was before.
At the Munciana gym, Lingenfelter shook his head. "Why do we want to be where we were?" he asked Charlotte. "Why wouldn't we want to be better?"
Charlotte threw herself into rehab, a grueling process she naively once thought might take a week, but was actually several long months.
She was determined to save her senior season.
"She was very adamant with me," Bloom says now. "Like, 'I will be back this fall.' I didn't know if that was going to happen, but she really believed it."
Erin figured Charlotte could perhaps make it back at some point before the season ended. "In my mind I was like, 'Well maybe senior night at the end of the season it can be like a little token serve,' you know? That's not where Charlotte's brain was."
Toward the end of August, Charlotte was clear: She would play in Yorktown's game against Wapahani on Sept. 3. That day, Charlotte had a battery of tests and three appointments with doctors at Riley before being cleared to play -- front row only -- later that night. Fans greeted her with a standing ovation. Some cried. Charlotte delivered a match-high 13 kills from her outside hitter position.
She played in every game after that, leading the Tigers to another state final. She played in her final club season for Munciana that summer and later traveled to Croatia as part of the U19 national team.
By the time she arrived on Indiana's campus this summer, Charlotte felt like she had regained the fitness she had lost. She felt like she had fulfilled Lingenfelter's promise to get even better.
CHARLOTTE CALLS ERIN CRYING. She was a few weeks into summer workouts with Indiana and had just left a meeting with the team doctor and coach Steve Aird. She tells her mom that Indiana doctors want to learn more about her condition before they will medically clear her to play. To Charlotte it felt like a hard reset, sending her all the way to the beginning.
She had ambitious goals -- to play in college, win an NCAA championship -- and at age 16, when most kids are getting their driver's license, she had learned there was a finite time to accomplish them. She had learned that you could get a fever one day and never wake up. The very condition that made her a walking liability is what made her eager to crash into her freshman season full steam ahead.
"I was angry," says Charlotte, dressed in a brown Alo sweatsuit. Inside the team film room, white binders and a scouting report for tomorrow's game against Oregon litter the table in front of her. "I'm someone who likes to have a plan, like this is what I'm going to do, no one's going to stop me. For that to be put on hold, it made me question things."
Her nails are painted mint green. The color on her right thumb is irreparably chipped. When she pauses, she fills in the blanks by talking with her hands; her fingers are slender, long enough to easily palm a volleyball.
"It took me a while to be like, 'OK, this is my new plan, this is what I'm doing now.'"
Charlotte's older sister, Kate, an assistant director of compliance at Indiana and a former volleyball player at Ball State, absorbed much of Charlotte's frustration. Charlotte spent a lot of time in Kate's office over the next few weeks, eating her lunch and stewing.
"It was a big struggle mentally," Kate says. "I don't think she knew how hard it was going to be. She's been a starter on every team she's ever played on and had to change her mindset to, 'All right, in practice I'm going to be the best I can be for the team.'"
Aird wouldn't budge. He had learned in the few weeks of Charlotte being on campus that she valued honesty. He liked that a lot. She wanted to be coached hard, even if the message was blunt. Now Aird was being blunt.
"He basically told me to suck it up." Charlotte says, laughing.
She'd been through so much, Aird said. Compared to everything else, this was a minor setback.
Aird had been in the waiting room of the ICU while Charlotte was sedated and hooked up to multiple life-saving machines. Later, the Indiana coaching staff would visit in shifts once it looked like Charlotte would be OK.
Aird pauses. "I'm not talking about OK as in playing volleyball. I'm talking about OK as in being on the planet."
With Charlotte, Aird balanced conflicting desires. Charlotte wanted to play. He didn't want her collapsing midgame. Charlotte wanted to play now. He saw her as part of a long-term plan for the program. They discussed the idea of redshirting, which Charlotte rejected. Aird preached patience.
"I want to do what I love now," Charlotte says. "Going through that big change in my life, not every day is promised. I don't know what can happen in three, four years from now."
But Charlotte tried her best to reconcile her plans for freshman year with her coach's long-term vision. Doctors cleared Charlotte 10 games into the season. Six matches after that, on Oct. 12 against Michigan State, Charlotte played in her first collegiate match. She had two attack errors and a service error. Phil and Erin sat in the stands and cheered.
CHARLOTTE TWIRLS THE BALL twice in her right hand before lofting it impossibly high, 8 to 10 feet into the air. Her right arm rears back like a loaded bow and, at the very top of her jump, slingshots the ball over the net in a beautifully violent motion. It's a Thursday in November, the day before Indiana's game against Oregon. The team has split onto either side of the net, balls slinging cross-court that student managers wrangle onto carts.
Charlotte grabs another ball. She's practicing the same topspin serve that two Oregon players favor so her teammates will be familiar with their opponents' serve on Friday. Charlotte's float serve is more consistent, but her jump topspin serve is nasty. Most of her playing time right now comes when Aird subs her in to serve.
"She'll hit it with a lot of spin and then it cuts one way or the other," assistant coach Matt Kearns says. "Eventually, that serve is going to be a real weapon for her."
In addition to serving, Charlotte has been working with Kearns since August on the timing of her hits. Making contact with the ball at the peak of her ascension to optimize her power instead of swinging on the way down. The Indiana coaching staff is excited for the offseason, when Charlotte can start adding the muscle and physicality needed to make the technique she's learning really pop. They envision moving her to opposite hitter next season.
Near the end of practice, Aird runs the Hoosiers through one last drill. It's 6 vs. 6. He throws the ball at the net or spikes it at the back row, unpredictable actions that are supposed to simulate the middle of a play. It's fast and chaotic and it's supposed to be.
"I'm trying to make you lose this," Aird says, tapping at his temple. "All of my best teams stay calm."
A student manager dials up the scoreboard: Oregon vs. Indiana. Charlotte is playing for Oregon. The gym explodes in a cacophony of noise, exclamations of mine! and short! and set! staccato the air.
It's 3-2 Indiana. Charlotte rears up and gets blocked, the ball ricocheting high and into the hands of "Oregon's" setter. Undaunted, Charlotte loads once more, scrambling back before taking three big lunges toward the net and yelling. "Again! Again!" This time, she beats the block. Sitting at the scorer's table, the student manager updates the scoreboard for Indiana. Charlotte notices, and looks incredulously at the lit-up board.
"You just gave them a point!"
She's smiling, but her point is clear. Fix the score.
"You just play hard," assistant coach Kevin Hodge laughs. "Don't worry about how the points get distributed."
The score stays 4-2 Indiana.
Aird gathers his team at midcourt at the end of practice. A white gym towel is slung over his shoulder. He tells the players to take care of each other. Check in on each other. An Indiana tennis player was hospitalized just a few days ago after an e-scooter accident. As a parent, he says, the idea of a scooter accident scares the bejesus out of him. As a coach ... he implores his players to ask for a ride from teammates or staff if they need one.
"What we do today," he tells them, "matters tomorrow." He reminds them to soak in the energy of the home crowd tomorrow night -- "We've earned that!" -- and then closes out practice.
CHARLOTTE DOESN'T PLAY against Oregon, but Indiana wins in four sets to get its first victory over Oregon in program history. Charlotte finds her family waiting courtside after the game.
She hugs Kate, Erin, Phil, and her grandpa. Kate and Erin tease her. She smells fresh, like her elbow and shin pads are finally, thankfully being laundered, likely by a diligent Indiana staffer. In high school, Charlotte infamously neglected to wash her gear. Opening her gym bag felt dangerous, and when Charlotte stashed the offending bag into the car, Kate refused to ride with her. Charlotte scrunches up her nose. Sniffs the red and white sleeves she had slipped off after the game and crumpled into her fists.
"It's not bad!" she says, and together they laugh.
Charlotte committed to Indiana for the chance to build something new, yes, but this, with her family, is what she had pictured too.
Erin and Phil have made it to almost every game. Her younger brother Andrew comes. Kate, who lives 10 minutes from campus, is a regular in the stands. One of the nurses from Riley attended a game earlier this season. Bloom made it to one, too. Indiana earned a spot in the NCAA tournament for the first time in 15 years and will host the first two rounds in Bloomington. The fourth-seeded Hoosiers play Toledo on Thursday.
Charlotte almost died when she was 16 years old, before her friends and family could ever watch her play for Indiana. She remembers very little of those critical days at Riley. They can't forget. Kate still cries, somber and grateful, talking about those first 48 hours at Riley. Erin, too, describes herself as more emotional these days.
"I mean, I'm crying at TikTok videos and stuff!" She laughs at herself. "Why am I crying at the kid who got a dog for Christmas?"
Erin keeps a tote bag in the basement filled with cards, photos and signs that friends and family and strangers sent to the hospital. There's a banner with Charlotte's name on it that people in Yorktown signed. Praying for Charlotte.
"I figure we'll keep it if she wants it," Erin says. "I don't know if she wants to see it or not. She wants to move forward. Her focus was, 'I want to get stronger.'"
Erin pauses and sighs. "I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if she -- can you ever fully process what happened? ... You don't have to think about all the things you went through because you're moving forward. Maybe it's self-preservation."
Charlotte has her own reminders of what she endured and what she survived.
Back in the Indiana film room, she sweeps her dark straight hair aside and brushes her fingers over a quarter-sized scar on her neck from where the ECMO tube connected into her body. She has a matching scar near her upper thigh. A simple plastic surgery procedure can reduce the scarring, doctors told her, but Charlotte chose to keep them.
"It's a part of me now," she says.
During her rehab, Charlotte decided she wanted a tattoo, but waited until she turned 18. When she arrived on campus for her freshman year, she got two. She has a line of four hearts, drawn by each family member, on her right wrist. The second tattoo is hidden on her rib cage. A tulip, for her grandma. Vinson written in cursive, curls up the stem.
"She was there for me," Charlotte says. Her voice drifts off. "I think ..." She pauses and starts again. "I think she pushed me back down and it's like, 'OK, you're going to keep living.'"