Katie Hughes is a mere wisp of a girl with alabaster skin and an armful of medals.
The medals didn’t come easy. For years, Katie practiced leaps and kicks and pivots at the Trinity Academy school of Irish dance.
She was good. She loved it. And she wasn’t going to give it up, even when doctors discovered in 1995 that the 12-year-old’s spine was crooked.
“They said it was scoliosis. I didn’t even know what it was,” the now 16-year-old said.
The diagnosis would be a distressing one for anyone, let alone a girl with a passion for dance. Would she appear misshapen next to the straight figures of her troupe? Could she perform wearing a hard, heavy brace around her midriff? Would she aggravate her condition, perhaps sacrificing her health for a few whirls around the stage?
“I was thinking, why did this have to happen to me?” she said.
But Katie, who also suffers from asthma, didn’t give up dancing, and in February she won second place in solo competition at the All Ireland Dance Championship in Ennis, Ireland. It’s considered a tremendous feat for a foreign competitor.
“You just need determination,” said the dancer, who also has had the help of a brace that stabilizes her spine.
The youngest of four children, Katie’s mother, Kathy, is a gift processor at Loyola University and dad Mike is a Chicago police officer. The family lives in Garfield Ridge near Midway Airport.
Kathy is first-generation Irish-American. Her husband’s lineage is an amalgamation of Irish, French and German.
Kathy Hughes relished hearing stories about Ireland as a child. “We’d just sit, spellbound,” she said.
Both Mike and Kathy wanted Katie and their elder daughter, Erin, to learn step dancing, a Celtic folk tradition unknown to most until a bare-chested phenomenon from Chicago’s Southwest Side named Michael Flatley appeared on the national scene.
“People say, `Oh, you do that Riverdance stuff, huh?’ ” Katie said.
Though there were plenty of Irish dance schools on Chicago’s South Side, the Hughes’ decided to enroll Erin and Katie in Trinity, an acclaimed Irish dance school based on the city’s Northwest Side.
Not only do its students win awards regularly, but they travel extensively to international folk festivals, to Washington to perform for the president and, even, to Los Angeles for “The Tonight Show.”
“Trinity is just unbelievable,” Kathy Hughes said.
In a gym in the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave., Trinity dancers glide across a wooden floor, their arms stiffly by their side as their legs flutter, bend and twist.
“Ashley! Your butterflies and scissors better be perfect,” the red-headed instructor, Colleen Martin, warns, as girls chat in clumps in the back of the room, waiting to perform for her in pairs.
“Katie Flannery! Get your butt working on your slip jig,” Martin admonishes. “Let’s go, McLaughlin!”
No cream puff, Martin barks commands like a Marine, telling her charges to hop, turn back, step and pull. Occasionally she marches alongside them, gently swatting their legs into position as she “advises” them–nose to nose.
Katie, who is blond and wafer-thin, started taking lessons when she was in kindergarten.
“I didn’t like it,” she said.
But she kept coming back.
One day, in May 1995, Trinity founder Mark Howard was fitting Katie for a costume when he noticed that her left shoulder drooped slightly.
He called her mom. “He said: `I think she has scoliosis,’ ” Kathy Hughes recalled.
Doctors at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center agreed. Her back had a 36-degree curve.
“My spine makes an S,” Katie said.
A few more degrees and Katie would have been a candidate for surgery, in which metal rods would be inserted into her back to stabilize the curvature.
Instead, she was instructed to wear a hulking back brace, 23 hours a day. The one hour free was for bathing–not dancing.
“It’s almost like having an iron lung or something,” Howard said.
The adjustment was difficult for Katie. The contraption was uncomfortable and unsightly.
“Oh, my gosh, it goes from here to there,” Hughes’ sympathetic teammate, Katie Flannery, said pointing the length of her midsection. “It’s plastic. It’s hard.”
Doctors did not order Katie to stop dancing, however.
“When we’re treating children with curvature of the spine, we encourage activity,” said Katie’s doctor, Kim Hammerberg.
Ideally, she would have worn the brace while dancing. But she balked, and Hammerberg didn’t press the issue. “Sometimes, I’ve found if you try too hard or push too hard with a brace, you wind up with a very reluctant patient and one who doesn’t wear the brace at all,” he said.
As her growth slowed, Katie was permitted to gradually reduce the amount of time she spent in the brace. Now she wears it only while sleeping.
Her asthma is controlled with an inhaled steroid medication.
“In spite of her scoliosis and asthma, she is reaching championship performance levels,” said Dr. Anita Gewurz, Katie’s allergist.
Katie always will have scoliosis, and doctors can’t be sure her condition won’t worsen. But for now, it seems to be in check.
Next month, Katie and roughly 30 other Trinity Academy dancers are scheduled to return to Ireland to compete in solo dancing for the World Competition, the Olympics of Irish dancing.
It’s uncertain whether Katie will compete, however, having fractured her foot recently during a performance in Milwaukee.
She’s disappointed, but confident that she’ll be back on the dance floor before long.
“If you want it bad enough, you know not to give up on yourself,” she said.
