What you never knew about Madi

Of all the physical setbacks suffered by the Lady Griz last season, hers was the most insidious, wouldn't you agree?

Wait, how could you? It was kept mostly quiet, a secret shared between her and her parents, her coaches and her teammates. The rest of us were kept not only out of the loop but in the dark.

We gnashed our teeth and rent our garments when we heard of Kayleigh Valley's career-ending ACL injury, her second in a calendar year, a ceiling of unknown heights never to be reached.

We shed a tear when we learned that Alycia Harris, trying to make a go of it on battered knees, just couldn't do it anymore, and we did the same thing when we saw Sophia Stiles, a player in constant movement when she's on the court, stilled, lying on the floor, her own ACL no longer in one piece.

But we never learned about hers, and it kept us from truly appreciating everything she gave us, not only on game days but in simply making it through a set of practices each week.

We had no idea she was taking ibuprofen before every practice and again before going to bed, or how she kept a small heating pad plugged into whatever outlet she could find wherever the Lady Griz happened to be practicing, her personal oasis of temporary relief.

Or how she ended up resorting to loading up on NyQuil, the only way she knew to fight off the discomfort that set in each night and left her crying from the pain, and finally get the rest that she needed, a preemptive strike of acetaminophen and doxylamine succinate.

Or that she arrived at the team's annual postseason banquet last May in a wheelchair, one day after surgery to eradicate an infliction that had hindered her the previous eight months and could have cost her not only most of the season but the entire spring semester of classes had she not been so resilient.

The way the doctors described it last fall, she had developed calyceal diverticula, the former being small strands within the kidney, the former a type of pocket that can develop at their ends, randomly, the perfect abnormality to capture and hold whatever might be passing through on its way out of the body.

And ultimately create an infection -- unseen but certainly not unfelt -- that was enough to reduce Madi Schoening to tears on a regular basis, the same Madi Schoening who, even without this long ordeal, would go down as one of the toughest players to wear a Lady Griz uniform in program history.

"She certainly never played scared and just powered through it. I don't think anybody had any idea," says Lady Griz coach Shannon Schweyen, who knows something about playing a season through some pain and discomfort, which she did as a senior with a shoulder that kept wanting to dislocate.

"She's a battler. She played through a lot. We're looking forward to getting her back stronger than ever and healthy this year."

It announced itself just over a year ago, right before the start of the fall semester, when some pain in her stomach had her wondering what it was that she'd eaten that day or trying to remember if the team had done a new kind of abdominal workout that might have tweaked something.

She knew neither was the scenario the next morning when she awoke, sweating and pale and sick. A stop at the health center on campus didn't give her much help or peace of mind, so she dialed up her aunt, a nurse practitioner in Missoula.

Schoening's white blood cell count was low, alarmingly so, an indicator of an infection, so she was rushed off to the emergency room. Six days later she was still at the hospital, no one working on her case really knowing what was going on.

They'd seen this in the elderly, those four times older than Schoening, but it was rare for it to present itself in someone so young, so vibrant. Could it be what they thought it might be?

A drain was inserted in her back to slowly leak the infection out, giving her a bag, "my little buddy" she called it, that she kept hidden in some loose shorts when she was finally able to start going to classes four days into the semester.

A few days later the drain was removed, and the hope was that the issue would be resolved. Infection gone, problem solved. It wasn't. Schoening didn't feel any better. The pain and discomfort were manageable, but that's no way for a 20-year-old Division I athlete to go through life.

You might remember the Kentucky game in November, or the Gonzaga game two days later, or the breakthrough wins at the Lady Griz Classic in early December. Schoening was there -- she didn't miss a game all season -- she just isn't sure how exactly.

"I look back at some games and think, Wow, that was a day I was completely not okay," she says. "If it was one of the days that was not good for me, it felt like I was nonexistent, and that was frustrating.

"It was a day-to-day thing as for how I would feel. It was hard for anyone to know, so it was a challenge."

Finally something had to be done. The team was on its four-day Christmas break, and Schoening was at her grandma's house. It was as bad as it had been since it developed in late August. It was taking over.

They knew now what it was -- calyceal diverticula -- and they offered the option of doing it then, of removing the quarter-sized troublemaker from her fist-sized kidney, of making everything right.

It would end the pain, which she wanted more than anything, but it would also mean a lengthy recovery, longer than what was left of the basketball season, and the thought of missing that was even worse.

"I'd already been dealing with it for a few months, so I told them I wanted to ride it out," she says, which is why she was in the starting lineup on Dec. 28 when Montana opened its Big Sky Conference schedule with a home game against Northern Arizona.

That Schoening went 1 for 8 in that game, just a few dozen hours after declining surgery that would have made her life much more comfortable, caught our attention didn't it? What's wrong with Madi? we asked under our breaths. Why is she so good one game then struggling the next?

If only we'd known. But that's not what she wanted.

"I didn't want to use it as an excuse," she says. "I didn't want to show a weakness or have it be used as an excuse for a bad game."

She didn't need to two days later, not after knocking down four 3-pointers and scoring 15 points in a home win over Southern Utah.

She was held scoreless in Montana's loss at Northern Colorado -- "I had plenty of chats with Shannon when I just told her I was sorry," Schoening says -- then scored a season-high 20 points the next game out.

She didn't score a point at Southern Utah and had just one rebound. With the downs came the ups: She had her magnum opus in Montana's home blitzing of Montana State, finishing with 18 points and 14 rebounds.

Schweyen said afterwards that she had challenged Schoening that week in practice to be more assertive and aggressive. And we accepted that it was Schoening simply deciding to play harder, not knowing what she was dealing with.

"I wasn't feeling normal all of last year. It was a mental game, since it was such a day-to-day thing," she says. "You can't really do much about a kidney." Adds Schweyen, "She toughed it out through the year not really ever feeling well."

And we collectively blush -- or we should -- at what was our then rush to judgment when she wasn't at her best.

How do her numbers look now, now that you know her story? That she averaged 8.7 points and grabbed 4.5 rebounds, when contact is the last thing someone with a kidney issue needs or wants. That she went 62 for 72 (.861) from the free throw line, the fifth-best average in program history.

It feels like we owe her something, doesn't it? How much gratitude and appreciation can fit inside Dahlberg Arena anyway?

She finished classes two weeks early in the spring in order to speed up the timing of the surgery. Had she played in a different era, they would have had to cut her open from front to back to get at what they needed. She has five little scars after the laparoscopy, "which is incredible," she says.

"It used to be a six-month recovery instead of the six weeks I had. It saved me quite a bit of time."

Surgery was performed and she was released the next day, the day of the team's annual banquet, at which she arrived in a wheelchair. She "was still pretty out of it," but she wasn't going to miss the final team gathering of the year.

She had put team above self in December, when she put off surgery. Why would this time be any different?

Her parents came down from Sandpoint and stayed with her that first week, making sure she was getting in the two five-minute walks she was prescribed. And even that felt like a challenge so soon after surgery, when everything still felt so knotted up and all she wanted to do was remain lying down.

The player who routinely takes on bigger opponents in her defensive assignments was forbidden from lifting anything heavier than 10 pounds, as the layers of tissue that had been cut mended themselves.

"I lost a lot of muscle and conditioning," she says. "After four weeks I started going on longer walks. It wasn't until after six weeks that I could go on little jogs. To go from ground zero to now has been tough."

But she's finally getting there. It took those initial six weeks for her to recover back to the baseline of normal human functioning. She still needed to work herself back into basketball shape, though, and it's been a grind that is finally starting to show some payoff.

"I'm finally feeling like I'm over the hump, which is perfect timing," says Schoening, whose team had its first practice of the season on Thursday morning. "The last couple of weeks is the first time I've started to feel normal again.

"They think I'm recovering quickly, even if it hasn't always felt that way, so I just trust the process."

But what about us? How do we make things whole? How do we make things right with Madi? We didn't know, so it isn't our fault we weren't there last winter to offer our support, the kind we gave in surplus to Kayleigh and Alycia and Sophia.

We owe her something, even if she's good with the way things stand between us. She never wanted attention in the first place. Me? I needed to do something, so I'm giving her this.

University of Montana Athletics

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