Softball: Grayslake North's Pozezinski powers past her problems

Having already won a battle with a tumor growing inside her, Jenna Pozezinski wasn't about to let her softball dreams shrink away to nothing because of a little hip injury.

OK, like the tumor nestled in her left ovary two years earlier, the hip injury wasn't little.

During a softball exposure tournament in St. Louis with her Northern Ice travel team in late fall of her junior year, she somehow yanked her femur out of her hip socket while trying to avoid a pitch speeding toward her head. If a dislocated hip sounds gruesome and painful, that's because it's gruesome and painful.

"It was my first at-bat of the day, the 8 a.m. game," said Pozezinski, who graduated from Grayslake North last Sunday. "The dirt was moist from rain the night before. The first pitch was a riseball inside. I went to turn away and duck, and my front foot stayed. When I twisted, I completely rotated my whole entire femur."

To clarify, that's not good.

"I just collapsed," Pozezinski said. "I had no idea what was happening at the time. Dislocated hips, that's not something that happens normally."

Flash forward about three months later. The high school softball season was about a month away. She needed clearance from her doctor to resume playing softball.

"Her hip doctor told her that she would be cleared to go back if the bone looked healthy, but he recommended that she take up swimming and cycling," said Julie Pozezinski, Jenna's mother.

Swimming and cycling? Sorry, Doc. The softball player was having none of that.

Retiring from softball wasn't an option for Jenna, who was good enough at the sport to be invited to join the varsity on its Spring Break trip to Florida her freshman year.

"She just kept getting kicked in the gut," Julie said of her daughter. "Every time you turned around there was another thing that was a setback for her, and she fought back. She wanted to prove to her doctor that she wasn't going to let that (hip injury) stop her from playing. He finally said, 'Fine. This is your life. You're working hard. More power to you.' And he let her go back to playing."

It was hip-hip-hooray news, so to speak, for Grayslake North's softball team. It was, no doubt, tears-of-joy good news for Pozezinski. She put together an all-area campaign her junior season, hitting .431, and starred for the Knights again this spring, both at the plate and in the pitching circle. Last fall, she committed to play softball for Concordia University in Wisconsin and signed her letter of intent during late winter.

Who would have foreseen that a couple of years ago?

Not Jenna.

"There were multiple times during this whole entire journey that I definitely felt like I was not going to be able to play again," she said. "It made me very upset."

During the fall of her freshman year, Jenna was frustrated. She was suffering severe back pain, and no one could figure out why.

"My mom thought I pulled something in my back," said Jenna, who was also playing volleyball at the time.

Finally, in January, she had an MRI. Her back looked fine. But there was a problem. The MRI - "on a fluke," Julie said - revealed something on Jenna's left ovary. What doctors originally thought was a cyst turned out to be a 7-cm-sized tumor.

Around the same time, doctors had done an X-ray of Jenna's hip and found her femur was misshapen. That led to an MRI of her hip, which showed a labrum tear.

An ultrasound, meanwhile, revealed that, in just a month since Jenna had the MRI on her back, the tumor had grown.

Life had gotten serious, quickly. Jenna didn't travel to Florida with the varsity softball team, but instead had the tumor removed. Doctors even found another tumor in her other ovary during the surgery.

Six weeks later, Jenna had her labrum tear repaired.

"We say by the grace of God we found the tumors, because it was not something that we ever anticipated," Julie said. "There were no symptoms whatsoever for the tumors."

Two days after the surgery, doctors told the Pozezinskis that both tumors were benign.

Flash forward 18 months to that softball tourney in St. Louis. While in the ER, according to Julie, six doctors helped put Jenna's femur back into the hip socket. At least no surgery was required.

"Even the doctors were saying that it is virtually impossible for a human to pull their own femur bone out of the hip socket," Julie said. "It's usually from a car accident or a fall from real high."

Jenna described her femur as "twisted and lodged" in the top of her hip bone. Being the tough athlete that she is, just grinned and beared it. Well, maybe not grinned.

"I was in so much shock that I didn't really realize how much pain I was in until I was laying in the bed at the hospital," Jenna said.

"As her mom, the proud part is that she just battles through all of these adversities and just had a goal," Julie said. "I wish you could see her room. She's got all these Post-it notes and motivating sayings."

There are days when Jenna's hip aches. There are games, when after she's been pounding her hip while trying to pound the strike zone all day, that she hurts.

But, hey, she's going to Concordia, where she plans to pursue a major in radiologic technology, which has to do with performing diagnostic imaging examinations. She has experience with MRIs and X-rays, after all.

"I feel like everything that's happened to her has happened for a reason," Julie said. "It's unfortunate that she had to go through the trials she did to get to this point, but it really led her to figure out who she was and what she wanted to do with her life.

"That's golden."

Guessing Jenna's hip doctor would agree.

jaguilar@dailyherald.com

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