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    Complications: The diagnosis was bad. The aftermath was calamitous. My new life as a medical train wreck.
    Complications: The diagnosis was bad. The aftermath was calamitous. My new life as a medical train wreck.
    Complications: The diagnosis was bad. The aftermath was calamitous. My new life as a medical train wreck.
    Ebook63 pages1 hour

    Complications: The diagnosis was bad. The aftermath was calamitous. My new life as a medical train wreck.

    By Todd Balf

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    His story begins as cliché: an aging jock with nagging lower-back pain. For the better part of a year, he ignores it, convinced he has a slipped or herniated disk. It’s only when he can no longer ride a bike, a lifelong passion, that he makes the doctor appointment. The problem isn’t a disk; it’s a tumor on his spine the size of a softball.


    In the summer of 2014, Todd Balf, author of the acclaimed adventure tales The Darkest Jungle and The Last River, was diagnosed with a rare spinal cancer called chordoma. Only three hundred cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, meaning that Balf was literally one in a million. During two long and risky surgeries, a team of specialists removed the tumor and buttressed his damaged spine with a scaffolding of metal rods. Having survived the surgery, itself a minor miracle, Balf was told that, with some rehab and follow-up radiation, he would soon be back to his former athletic self. He wasn’t. The surgery had resulted in a spinal-cord injury that left one of his legs partially paralyzed. Give it time, his doctors advised. The nerves might heal.


    Thus began Balf’s membership in a tribe. The disabled. He imagined his own disability would be temporary, a short visit to a foreign land. He spent years test-piloting remedies that might spark his spinal nerves back to life. With the same gusto and good humor that he brought to his work as a writer, he searched for the perfect treatment: anti-gravity treadmills, adaptive bikes, endless rehab and trips to the gym, and—why not?—a few long-distance cycling events. His wife and children, long accustomed to Balf’s kinetic energy and sometimes harebrained schemes, cheered him on and hoped for the best.


    Then came unexpected surgery to repair broken rods in Balf’s spine, followed by yet another complication: a stroke that jeopardized not only his recovery but his professional career. Balf wasn’t just one in a million. Thanks to his unresolved spine injury, topped off with a stroke, he was now an “n of 1”—a single case study. Before his long medical misadventure, Balf had always relished being one of the healthiest and fittest people around. Now he was unique for all the wrong reasons.  


    Complications recounts Balf’s journey from cancer diagnosis to his present-day reality as a man caught between two worlds. Both moving and irrepressibly joyful, Complications is a forthright account of what it’s like to suffer a physical catastrophe and manage the uncertainty that comes with it. What’s the right balance between striving to recover and accepting limitations? Was he still just visiting the land of the disabled, or there for good? Who was Todd Balf now?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateJul 21, 2020
    ISBN9781094408194
    Author

    Todd Balf

    Todd Balf is a former editor at Outside magazine whose writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, GQ, Runner’s World, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Last River, The Darkest Jungle, and Major.

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    Reviews for Complications

    4.5/5

    47 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Complications is a painful story to read as a person with lumbar disc disease or disorder. My back hurt the whole time I was reading it. Realistically, however, every reader of a powerful story like this has to learn and acknowledge, along with the author, the incredibly human way we have to endure what seems to be ultimate cruelty and yet , we finally have to come to terms with and accept our limitations.

      Dr. Francine K. Richter
    • 5/5
      Moving. Inspiring. Unflinchingly honest. A must—read for anyone who has faced enormous hurdles.
    • 5/5
      Just thank-you, Todd, for sharing your story. I read every word and did not find a single thing to criticize, and I am told I am too critical. Please write more.

    • 5/5
      Gracious in his ability to share the agony and ecstasy. Economic, really non- indulgent - especially because it so easily could be. God love Todd and Patty...and their kids.
    • 2/5
      I was very interested in reading this book because we had a lot of issues in common due to illness. His story is interesting but I can’t say inspiring. I think the best way I could say it is he was very annoying. I know he went through terrible trials but the way he wrote about did not inspire me to think of him as anything but a spoiled brat.. maybe it’s his writing style I don’t like or it’s just his personality. Either way it was disappointing.
    • 5/5
      Todd is a writer who has solid research skills as he coveys insightful perspective to a subject, a skill demonstrated in his books. To write so objectively about his own situation and covey perspective to the reader is impressive.
    • 5/5
      Incredibly moving. And smart. And even entertaining, despite being about medical calamities. A wonderful read

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      honest writing. lots of highs and lows shared through his words. inspiring.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Motivational psychology at its best! His description of the ‘complications’ he endured shows his strength of character, his ability to overcome whatever came his way. It minimizes my aches and pains...any complaints I might have ...

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Complications - Todd Balf

    Diagnosis: One in a Million

    THE DAY I WAS DIAGNOSED with a rare spine cancer, I knew I had a problem, just not that problem. For the better part of a year, I had stripped away movements—from gym core routines I didn’t much like anyway to things I did, like raking a yard of warm compost into old winter soil. I told others that when I could no longer ride a bike, a lifetime passion, I would see my doctor to confirm what I already knew: I had a disk problem. Every fifty-year-old I knew had some sort of lower-back ailment they didn’t do anything about. We were a league, stoic and proudly inattentive. In July of 2014, I couldn’t sleep or stand without having disabling waves of nerve pain running the course of my legs. I was off the bike. I made the appointment.

    I knew they had seen something bad the moment the imaging techs slid me out from the white MRI silo. They had seemed distracted when I arrived. They weren’t now. Did I need more warm blankets? asked one. Something to drink? asked another. Is somebody coming to bring you home? They led me upstairs, where the head spine surgeon, a genial Irishman, showed me the image of a tumor type he had heard of but never seen in a patient. It was a softball-size mass affixed to my lower spine, billowing out north by northwest, distinguished by its lobed shape, which looked to my uneducated eye like the human brain. Dr. Terence Doorly stressed that nothing about this thing inside me—slow-growing, exceedingly rare, originating from leftover prenatal spinal cord cells—was run-of-the-mill.

    It was a bone cancer called chordoma. There were approximately three hundred cases diagnosed annually in the United States. I was literally one in a million. The doctor told me I’d freak out when I got home and that I should call him anytime. When you leave this office, you’re going to think of all the questions you should’ve asked, he said, correctly.

    Things moved quickly. One of the leading chordoma teams in the country was right here in Boston, at Massachusetts General Hospital. Three days later I was meeting with them. We overflowed a tiny examining room—surgeons, oncologists, fellows, nurses. A fellow in a white lab coat slipped in to offer a chemo-and-something clinical trial slot. Wait, was I that bad? Al, an RN care coordinator, diplomatically moved him along. Al wasn’t the nurse archetype I’d expected. He looked like the former secretary of labor Robert Reich.

    The chordoma team outlined a plan of daily radiation treatments for five weeks, followed by a short recuperation period, then surgery. Then a radiation top-off. The surgery involved two stages on separate days. First the team would go in from the front to put several spine-supporting rods in position. On the second day, they would flip me over to remove the diseased L2 and L3 vertebrae and muscle tissue from my right hip and briefly apply a radiation patch to a portion of the dura, the protective sheathing around the spinal cord. Another surgeon would harvest some of my right fibula (calf bone), repurposing it to span the several-inch gap in my divided spine. Each surgery was expected to take eight hours.

    I wasn’t supposed to be here. I led an active, healthy lifestyle. Never smoked. Bowed down to kale. Most people who learned what I did for a living told me that they wanted to do it, too. Traveling, seeing the world, writing about it in my barn-loft office overlooking a pocket-size vegetable garden crammed with tomato plants and snap peas. I had a great gig.

    Patty, a journalist in college, scribbled a lot of notes that first day. We had married a year after she graduated, and early on she had acquiesced to the adventures I urged on her: a nauseating high-altitude overnight in a dingy Quonset hut atop an active volcano in Guatemala; a remote Kokopelli mountain bike trail in Utah where she rode four-wheel support while pregnant; paddling on whitecapped Jackson Lake, in the Tetons, with months-old Celia in tow. This would be another adventure she really didn’t ask for. With our youngest child off early to college for preseason soccer, we had been quasi empty nesters for four days. On day five, I came home with cancer.

    The diagnosis, tests, and assortment of specialists gave me the impression that I was gravely ill, soon to be wheeled into surgery, but instead the medical process played out slowly. The photon and proton radiation had to be designed, scheduled, and delivered over months, a period of rest and pain management leading up to surgery. I wrote angsty, Thomas Paine–sounding notes to poor Al, with beseeching statements like Time seems very much of the essence and I’m ready and available.

    In the interim, I went to my kids’

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