Mt. Pleasant grad Mary Smithnosky tries to stay positive after rare tumor ends softball career

Mary Smithnosky knew something was wrong. These weren’t the usual aches and pains from being an athlete. It wasn’t normal for discomfort to come and go so readily.

Off and on from the time she was 13, she had spells where her hands or legs would tingle and go numb and she would experience pain in her upper back.

This happened while she was helping Mt. Pleasant win WPIAL and PIAA softball championships in 2021.

On cold days, she hurt bad. When the sun was heating up the field, she was often fine.

Her tolerance grew sharper, but so did the soreness and strain from an unknown ailment.

“The pain wasn’t all the time,” said Smithnosky, the lead pitcher for the Vikings who earned a Division I college scholarship to Western Michigan. “It would come and go. Some days, there was nothing. Some people didn’t believe me. They thought I just didn’t want to pitch. But the thing was, I couldn’t.”

Last June, she finally discovered the culprit: Smithnosky was diagnosed with an extremely rare tumor that had grown on the outside of her spinal cord.

The benign, pigmented mass located just below her neck was orange colored and the size of a large grape.

“They said it wasn’t hereditary or from anything that I did,” said Smithnosky, a rising junior at Western Michigan. “It is really rare. There is only something like 24 cases. Maybe I was No. 25. They said it was bad luck.”

But with bad luck came some good luck. After extensive testing, painstaking searches for second opinions and an off-diagnosis of thoracic outlet syndrome, her family discovered a Facebook group that included Dr. George Jallo, who confirmed through viewing an MRI — a test made possible by her chiropractor, Todd Ulery — that the tumor was operable and could be removed successfully.

On June 5, Smithnosky had surgery at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., and Jallo and his team removed the tumor.

“It was a breath of fresh air when we found out it was on the outside,” Smithnosky said. “If it had been on the inside, they would have had to cut my spinal cord and I could have been paralyzed. Not too many people knew about what I was going through.”

Had she left the tumor untreated, it could have caused natural paralysis, doctors said.

It was a trying time for her family members, who could only watch and wait.

“Mary became a different person; the light was gone from her eyes,” said Teena Smithnosky, Mary’s mother. “She didn’t tell many people. She didn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She was silently living in hell.”

The surgery, while completed and life-changing, came with a price: Smithnosky’s softball career is over.

Letting go of the game she loves will take time — like counting to 10 billion — but she is confident she made the right call. Reality had to outweigh illusion, even if it was heartbreaking.

She has overcome bouts of depression, a sign that the effects of the setback were just as mental as they were physical.

“It would take me a year to even get near ready to play again,” she said. “I mean, I had to relearn how to walk. I sat and cried about it. It is unbelievably hard to stop playing. The head of the school gave me a medical retirement. It’s the best thing.

“I am just happy to be alive. There are so many things that I will never take for granted again. Every single day is a gift.”

When Smithnosky was diagnosed, she stayed on the Western Michigan roster as a team manager.

She redshirted, hoping treatment would be enough to get her back to form, and making the dean’s list in the classroom along the way.

“Mary mostly suffered in private,” Teena Smithnosky said. “Mary has always been a fighter. She was a preemie born five weeks early.

“My heart broke because she seemed broken. She all of a sudden had to make a lot of grown-up medical decisions that she was not ready to make or actually felt it was unfair for her to have to make. She was supposed to be a college athlete enjoying the best time of her life. She was angry, and she was scared.”

Smithnosky finished 11 days of outpatient therapy this week in Monroeville but needs a walker or cane to get around until full feeling returns.

But she can see normal rounding second.

“I’m getting better each day,” she said. “I still can’t feel my leg, but I know it will take time.”

Teena Smithnosky noted, “The light is back in her eyes.”

Smithnosky played in 26 games as a freshman, starting three in the outfield, and banged out a few hits. Again, she shrugged off the pain until it went away, knowing it would return.

“I am happy that I got to play and lettered,” she said. “I was glad to still be a part of the team.

“My message to other athletes would be that if you’re feeling pain, get it checked. Don’t let other people tell you what you should or shouldn’t do about it.”

Smithnosky was able to follow her sister’s senior season at Mt. Pleasant, going to the Vikings’ opening WPIAL playoff game weeks before her surgery.

Sophia Smithnosky also became a key pitcher for the Vikings. She will play collegiately at Ashland.

“Mary is one of the strongest people I have ever known, and to see her in such a vulnerable state crushes me,” Sophia Smithnosky said. “She’s given me a different view on life, to never take anything for granted at any moment. She has always and will always inspire me.”

Mary Smithnosky said: “All of my softball energy goes to her now. She wore my old number (55) on senior day. I think she is going to try to wear No. 4, my college number (at Ashland).”

Her support circle is not completely closed. While she recovers, Mary Smithnosky is awaiting the return of her boyfriend, Andrew, who was deployed to Syria as a member of the Army National Guard.

“People say that you are much stronger than you ever think you can be,” Teena Smithnosky said. “That is so true. I don’t think I ever really believed that until now.”