Do appeal based on the fact you are just like a freshman since you couldn’t enroll right after high school.
It’d look pretty bad if the Trib got a headline that read 'umn withdraws scholarships to kid who survived cancer for being in hospital rather than enrolling ’ (Can you guess I’m not a copy editor 
) or whatever illness you had to recover from.
If the scholarship comes straight from nmf you’d have to check with them as I don’t know whether they have an exception clause for illness.