High School Sports
Playing through: Cancer can't keep prep golfer off greens

By Greg Bishop
Seattle Times staff reporter

ROD MAR / THE SEATTLE TIMES Meadowdale High senior Kelly Hills qualified for the Class 3A state tournament last season while playing on a broken leg.

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LYNNWOOD — The rod creaks like a rusty door hinge every time the temperature drops to jacket weather. It sets off a series of beeps and security concerns every time Kelly Hills steps through a metal detector.

They're joined at the hip, quite literally, and all the way down to her right kneecap. Best of friends one minute, worst of enemies the next.

And sometimes, like before the Northwest District golf tournament last season, the rod shifts from creaky to cranky to intolerable. It shifted so far, in fact, that it ripped apart the joints in her right knee.

Her parents begged her not to play. Her coaches told her she had another season. The Meadowdale senior, who has battled bone cancer for 14 years, gathered them the morning before the competition began, offering three simple words burned on her personal broken record.

"I can't quit."

Playing on what doctors later determined was a broken leg, Hills shot an 88 and qualified for the Class 3A state tournament, where she shot a two-day 185 and finished 35th.

She underwent another knee operation — her 23rd overall — two weeks later.

"I will be playing golf until I'm crawling on the ground to get to my ball," Hills said. "Golf is my life. It takes me away from my cancer and all my problems. When I'm out there, I'm not the cancer kid anymore."

Just a regular one. Or an extraordinary one, when you get down to it.

"She lives in constant pain. That's just a fact of life."

— Joan Hills, Kelly's mother

She first felt that pain on a summer afternoon when she was only 4 years old. After falling off the rings at a Meadowdale playground, a lightning bolt of pain coursed through her leg. Thinking it was a stress fracture, doctors took X-rays.

The Hills next found themselves at Children's Hospital, with words like "bone cancer" and "40 percent chance of survival" echoing off the halls. Doctors told the family Kelly would likely lose her leg in two weeks.

"It's like watching TV and being in the background, but you can still kind of hear the noise," Joan Hills said. "I saw her whole life flash before my eyes. I kept telling the doctors, 'No, you're wrong. She just fell at the park. These X-rays aren't hers.' "

ROD MAR / THE SEATTLE TIMES Hills, whose bone cancer is in remission, had all but 2 inches of her right femur removed as a child.

Kelly spent the next 14 months in chemotherapy, alternating between five days in the hospital and two at home. She spent her fifth birthday and Halloween inside Children's, longing to be home with her baby sister.

Her body rejected much of the medication, and she vomited constantly. But she never complained when another hospital visit beckoned, packing her bags herself and consoling her family the night before doctors took the tumor out of her right leg.

"She woke up out of this stupor, threw up and looked at me," her mother said. "She said, 'Mom, this happens sometimes, and it's OK. Do you need a friend right now?' I mean, here was this 4-year-old with this incredible strength. That's when I knew this was going to be OK. I said to myself, 'This kid is amazing.' And she just keeps amazing us."

At the time, Kelly was the youngest bone-cancer patient in Children's Hospital history. Doctors removed all but 2 inches of her femur and placed a metal rod down her leg in place of the missing bone. They took out her outside quadriceps, performed a knee implant and left her with only three muscles in her leg.

Half real, half artificial, she calls it.

But Kelly still lives in constant and varying pain. Her leg houses it. She internalizes it. And golf takes her away from it.

"She's by far the toughest person I've coached in any sport."

— Josh Knowles, Meadowdale golf and wrestling coach

She had yet to discover golf when classmates picked up on her on-again, off-again use of crutches and a wheelchair, her steady absences for doctor's appointments and a limp walk now popularized by rap artists.

"Fake! Fake! Fake!" a large group taunted as they gathered around her on the school playground.

But Kelly wasn't going to let cruel classmates or metal rods or even doctors dictate her life decisions. She developed a routine for surgery, eating out with her family the night before, then taking her favorite blanket, "Raggy," and a different stuffed animal each time it was "their turn." She'd dress them up in little hospital gowns and put tiny stockings on their tiny feet. She even persuaded her doctor to keep her awake during several surgeries, metal instruments grinding like a chainsaw to provide the soundtrack.

One time, Joan Hills spied her daughter sprinting down the hall toward another surgery, her fourth while in the sixth grade.

"This isn't going to slow me down," Kelly told her later. "The sooner I get in, the sooner I'm going to be better."

"And her determination to keep going is really what got us through all this," her mother said.

Sports were Kelly's rehabilitation and escape. She rode bikes. She took grounders to bend her leg and strengthen it. She swam and took up archery.

But she didn't have the one thing she always wanted, a blue-and-white letterman's jacket emblazoned with letters from Meadowdale High School. Until she spied a flyer for the golf team.

"I wanted to prove to people that I wasn't just this cancer kid confined to a wheelchair and crutches, just limping around," she said. "Golf was my way out."

And Kelly Hills could play, making varsity her freshman season, advancing to the state tournament in 2001 and 2003 and earning all-WesCo second-team honors three times. She hopes to advance to state again this season, through the district tournament that concludes today.

	ROD MAR / THE SEATTLE TIMES Meadowdale senior Kelly Hills, pictured at a driving range, advanced to the state tournament in 2001 and 2003. Hills wants to revive the golf program at Edmonds Community College next year.

Sure, she has a doctor's note to a use a golf cart when playing 18 holes, a la Casey Martin and his fight with the PGA Tour over his right to use one. And yes, she has to make adjustments, using her hips less and her arms more.

"I can tell when she's in pain," said Lisa Keane, a freshman teammate. "She does a good job of masking it. I've never heard her complain about her leg — ever — which is amazing. Because I complain a lot."

"Right now, I can feel the rod moving because I'm having trouble in my hip, and it's coming loose. My leg will just buckle out from underneath me. It stings with pain, and I won't be able to walk."

— Kelly Hills

Just before her prom two weeks ago, Hills took her date and several friends to one of her many speaking engagements for Children's Hospital. Wearing a black-and-white prom dress, she talked about how bone cancer changed her life but did not define it.

Pain and golf remain two constants, even though her cancer is in remission. But neither has stopped Hills from a life fulfilled. She has turned herself into a national-level archer. She's the face on billboards and buses for advertisements for the Northwest Tissue Center.

Hills missed only part of one golf match this season because of the pain. And while her rod loosens and another surgery inevitably beckons, she helped Meadowdale hand Kamiak its only loss this season.

And next year at Edmonds Community College, she wants to revive the golf program there.

She's the cancer kid no longer, just a regular one, an extraordinary one, an inspirational one.

"I watched her give a speech to donor families," Joan Hills said. "One family came up afterward. They were crying, and so was I. I guess I'm just in awe of my daughter and what she can do."

Greg Bishop: 206-464-3191 or gbishop@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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