Brazos junior pitcher Taylor Brzozowski’s comeback from Chiari Malformation – a cerebellum issue that required surgery – culminated in her verbal commitment to play softball for Concordia College in February.

It was a year ago when the diagnosis came, March 4, 2021, and it was only through softball that they finally discovered the cause behind the headaches she had been experiencing since fourth grade.

“I slid into home and got tagged in the head so me and my parents thought maybe I had a concussion. But because of these headaches, my dad pushed the doctor to get an MRI,” Brzozowski said before the Cougarettes’ game against Royal Feb. 22. “The doctor denied it at first, but my dad was like, ‘No, we want an MRI.’”

The scan showed she had Chiari Malformation, which the Mayo Clinic describes as “when the section of the skull containing a part of the brain (cerebellum) is too small or is deformed, thus putting pressure on and crowding the brain. The lower part of the cerebellum (tonsils) is displaced into the upper spinal canal.”

From there, her parents Chris and Jennifer described the rest of the journey thankfully went well once the pieces eventually fell into place.

After some failed communication attempts to their desired specialist in New York City – Dr. Jeffrey Greenfield at the Weill Cornell Brain and Spine Center – one of Jennifer’s calls went to his direct assistant who relayed the MRI and soon set up a surgery appointment the following month, April 21, 2021.

Although Taylor hadn’t even been on a plane before, she said there weren’t many nerves before the surgery.

“Even when I was in there in the room and they put the IV in my hand and said, ‘OK we’re going to go back later,’ I was kind of just like, ‘Alright here we go,’” Taylor said. “I think at that point, I already knew everything was happening so I wasn’t really scared.”

Her parents said the first day post-op was rough but Chris was woken up the second night with a good sign.

“The second night she woke up in the middle of night,” Chris said. “She goes, ‘Dad,’ she looks over at me, grabs the bedrail and says, ‘Check this out.’ She sits all the way up, looks at me and she (gives a thumbs up) then said, ‘OK, I’m going back to bed.’”

“Then the next morning, the doctors come in and said, ‘Do you think you can sit up for us?’ and she (did it no problem),” Jennifer said. “That night, she asked to walk and they were not ready for her to do that. But I remember the first time she did get up; I filmed, he held her and they walked down the hallway and seeing her stand up, all bandaged up, barely walking at first was pretty rough but she’s a tough, tough kid.”

That tenacity showed in Taylor’s physical rehabilitation where she said she determined her college major would be kinesiology and set her sights on becoming a physical therapist assistant.

“I actually wanted to be an accountant first, I’ve always liked helping people, but my physical therapist told me that you have to have a good story to become a physical therapist so I figured I have a pretty good story now,” Taylor said.

Taylor was back on the diamond about five months after her surgery and softball once again proved to be a catalyst in her story where a missed message actually led to beneficial one-on-one time with a coach from a certain college.

Taylor and her friend, who also happened to be her catcher, rode up to a camp at St. Edward’s University in Austin and arrived at 10 a.m. even though pitchers and catchers were supposed to report at 9 a.m.

“The Concordia coach, the pitching coach (Haylee Guest), stayed back and was like, ‘I’ll work with them,’” Taylor said. “I was throwing and honestly it was not my best day but I was making adjustments well to what she said and talked to her. She was like, ‘Would you be interested in a school in Austin?’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s ideal,’ and then from there, she started talking to me more and then her dad is the head coach.”

They scheduled the visit and Taylor said she felt right at home around the campus and didn’t think she wanted to go anywhere else. She returned a couple weeks later to watch a game and shared a moment with her new teammates.

“The players that were in the dugout heard (Taylor tell Head Coach Jeff Staton), but they didn’t hear what was going on so they turn around they’re like, ‘What happened?’” Chris recounted. “They said, ‘She’s committed,’ and they cheered. Then the girls that were on the field heard the commotion so they came in, they’re like,

‘What’s going on?’ ‘She just committed,’ so they came in and got all loud and cheered too.”

“She said she was the first (Class of) 2023 commit for Concordia,” Jennifer said.

Taylor was celebrated in Wallis as well, where Brazos Head Coach Dustin Nilius said he is excited to still have two more years of her in the pitcher’s circle for the Cougarettes.

“Just getting to know her these last three years, that’s what she’s wanted to do forever,” Nilius said. “It’s so exciting for her, I love that she found a place that she feels like home. I know she took a lot of visits a lot of places and talked to a lot of coaches and the couple days before she decided to verbally commit, she talked to me and said it just feels like home.”

Just a year removed from diagnosis, and less than 11 months removed from surgery, although there are two more seasons of softball scheduled for her hometown team, Taylor knows that at the end of the day, nothing is promised.

“I’m still really hard on myself. So, I get mad at myself sometimes but I have to remind myself that I’m just now getting back into it. It’s all for fun at this point, I never know when they can get taken away again,” Taylor said. “I’ve learned that, at this point, I should just be appreciative for everything I have. I never know when it could be taken from me. But also, I would just say every day is going to be different because I still have bad days, I still get headaches, but I just know that OK, maybe tomorrow I’ll be better.”