Mark Story: UK gymnast's uncharacteristic fall might have been a life saver

Lying flat on her back on the floor of Florida's O'Connell Center, Kentucky gymnast Shelby Hilton kept thinking what everyone else in the arena had to be wondering.

I don't know why I did that. I don't know what happened. I don't know why I did that.

Only seconds into her floor routine in UK's Feb. 27 gymnastics meet at Florida, Hilton had launched her first tumbling routine. The senior from St. Petersburg, Fla., was normally such a consistent performer, UK Coach Tim Garrison used her as Kentucky's "leadoff hitter" for the floor rotation.

"Shelby was a great number one for us," Garrison said.

Yet this time, as Hilton rose into the air, her body inexplicably stopped performing gymnastics skills.

Shelby fell to the mat in a fashion equal parts awkward and shocking.

"She landed upside down," Garrison said. "If you were to be laying on your back and pull your feet up over the top of your head and touch the ground with your feet, she landed like that."

No one knew what to think.

"It was almost surreal," Garrison said. "... I couldn't believe it. I couldn't make sense of it in my mind. That's not something you would normally see from an athlete of her caliber — which is very high."

Shelby's UK teammates were dumbfounded. "It was just crazy," redshirt freshman Alyssa Bertoni said. "I've never seen anybody do that in a competition. ... We were looking around at each other, 'What? What was this?'"

Shelby's parents were stunned. Donna Hilton said her daughter had never taken such a fall, "not even in club (gymnastics). It all just seemed like a dream, like it all happened in slow motion."

Hank Hilton, Shelby's father, said "It seemed like a car crash, you know, where everything seems to slow way down? It was, just, shocking."

Amazingly, Shelby tried to get up and continue her routine, only to drop back to the mat.

When Garrison reached her side, the UK coach said she kept wondering the same things:

I don't know why I did that. I don't know what happened. I don't know why I did that.

In the moment, what no one knew is that Shelby Hilton's dramatic fall might have saved her life.

Fit and strong, 21-year-old college athletes are not supposed to get cancer.

Hilton was carried out of the O'Connell Center on a body board and taken to the University of Florida's Shands Medical Center.

After such a hard fall, doctors feared possible head trauma or a spinal injury. Yet a CT scan showed no negative effects from Shelby's crash landing.

What the scan did show were some blurry spots on Shelby's brain. An MRI was ordered to try to figure out what those were. After viewing it, the doctors said those shadows were four small lesions on the cerebellum, the lower, rear portion of the brain.

That meant a biopsy would be needed to figure out if the spots on Shelby's brain were malignant.

It was the oncology team at Shands that came into Shelby's hospital room with the news no one wanted to hear. Shelby had medulloblastoma, a form of pediatric brain cancer that usually afflicts boys who are younger than 16.

"I didn't think at 21 years old, let alone a student- athlete and being in shape, that I could even have cancer," Shelby Hilton said.

Recently, Shelby and Donna Hilton were walking through a CVS Pharmacy when they noticed they were in the female hair-products aisle.

"No reason for me to be here," Shelby joked ruefully.

College-aged women are not supposed to have all of their hair fall out.

To combat the cancer in her brain, Shelby and her family chose a two-pronged treatment. It started with proton therapy, a form of radiation that uses protons rather than X-rays to fight cancer cells. That first phase ended April 27. A separate stint of chemotherapy will begin June 8 at the Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital in Orlando.

Everything you hear about the challenging effects of radiation treatment can be verified by Shelby Hilton.

She has battled nausea. The 5-foot-2 gymnast's tautly conditioned body has lost weight. "About 8 pounds," Hank Hilton said. "And, remember, this is not somebody who had much weight to lose in the first place."

During the proton treatments, Shelby's taste buds went haywire. "Really off," she said. "It was really hard to eat foods I know I liked."

Coffee, a favorite thing, suddenly tasted toxic. "I can't even look at it," Shelby said.

Her hair fell out in April. Shelby then discovered that the wig market is not targeted at college students. "All the wigs, they were made for older people," Donna Hilton said. "We couldn't find anything that was geared toward a young person like Shelby."

Eventually, a wig shop special ordered for Shelby. A hairdresser tailored the wig to look like Shelby's natural hair.

Yet none of radiation's side effects has been as trying, Shelby says, as having her senior season of gymnastics at UK end prematurely. Shelby missed Kentucky's final two regular-season meets, the Southeastern Conference championships and UK's appearance in the NCAA regionals.

"The hardest part is not being a student-athlete anymore and not being in that atmosphere," she said. "And being used to being active and not having any health issues and all of that stopping."

#ShelbyStrong.

Shelby has found a significant positive from having cancer. "I didn't think this many people cared about me," she said. "But now I know."

The Oklahoma Sooners gymnastics program — against whom UK competed two weeks before Shelby's fall — sent her a card with a Dr. Seuss saying for 18 straight days. Then OU sent her a bat and pinata.

Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller, a 1996 gold medalist and an ovarian cancer survivor, reached out to Shelby and the two met in person.

Kentucky gymnastics publicist Charles Healy and Katy Poole, a UK athletics trainer, came up with the Twitter hashtag #ShelbyStrong. "We were just looking for a way to keep her name front and center so she'd know people here were thinking about her," Healy said.

For the Catspys — UK's annual athletics awards ceremony — basketball player Marcus Lee and other members of Kentucky's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee took the stage and FaceTimed with Shelby from Florida.

Donna Hilton said every student at the middle school Shelby attended sent her a hand-written, get-well letter.

On a Gofundme.com page set up to help Shelby and her family defray medical expenses, 496 donors had pledged $62,225 as of Friday.

At the SEC championships, Georgia gymnastics coach Danna Durante spearheaded the production of a video in which all Southeastern Conference teams appear. Each team yells "We're ShelbyStrong!"

"It's opened a lot of doors for me," Shelby said of being diagnosed with cancer. "I've met a lot of people who have been encouraging. So I kind of feel like it's a blessing in disguise — even though it really sucks."

The first time UK's Garrison spoke with Shelby after she learned she had cancer, the gymnast made a vow to her coach.

"She's just a positive kid, a happy kid (by nature)," Garrison said. "She's just like, 'No, I'm going to beat this thing. Don't worry about it, I'm going to get through it. I'm going to kick cancer's butt.'"

Doctors cannot make you any promises of how a battle with cancer will end. Still, Shelby said the oncologist who initially diagnosed her "said we couldn't have caught it any earlier. That was kind of reassuring."

Her chemotherapy doctor told her, Shelby reports, that "(this) is a curable cancer."

So if all goes according to plan, Shelby will return to UK next January to finish work on her degree in communications/broadcasting.

It's funny how life can play out. Had Shelby not fallen so dramatically on that tumbling run at Florida, the malignant lesions on her brain might have gone undetected until, well, you know.

"That whole accident in Florida, like, saved my life," Shelby Hilton said.

This story was originally published May 23, 2015 at 7:28 PM with the headline "Mark Story: UK gymnast's uncharacteristic fall might have been a life saver."