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When Abbey Olexa collided with another soccer player during a game last May, she pushed through the pain and continued playing. However, after two weeks of rest, the elite soccer striker still had pain. Abbey’s mother, Elizabeth, took the 14-year-old to orthopedic surgeon Gerardo Goldberger, DO. An MRI found [...]
Annemarie Duncan always led an active lifestyle, from golfing and gardening to joining her grandchildren on the trampoline. But more recently, severe back pain related to double scoliosis, spinal stenosis, arthritis, and bulging disks put many of her activities on hold. Last year, the 68-year-old Freehold resident traveled to [...]
Larry Donsky is known for cracking jokes and making people laugh, but when he suffered a heart attack last June, he got serious about his health with cardiac rehabilitation. Active in the men’s club of his adult community and the local Italian-American club, the 77-year-old Jackson resident regularly booked [...]
Feeling in the peak of health, 65-year-old Louise Cassar of Jackson visited her primary care physician in early February 2013 for her annual physical exam. To her surprise, the electrocardiogram (EKG), a routine part of the exam, revealed a slight abnormality. Despite Louise having had no symptoms that would [...]
Vicky Vydra, a 37-year-old mother of two from Marlboro, was an avid runner, skier, and scuba diver. When she developed a persistent headache, she was shocked that tests revealed she had a hole in her heart. After four weeks of debilitating headaches, Vicky visited her primary care physician, who [...]
Brian Collins is a leftie. While that fact usually doesn’t impact his life much, it became a serious concern when he severed six flexor tendons, the flexor muscle, and the ulnar nerve in his left forearm, hand, and wrist. Brian, a 44-year-old Howell resident, was walking up his front [...]
Ulcerative colitis by itself would have been bad enough. By the time Kristin Detamore, then 35, returned to work as a school social worker after the birth of her second son, she was accustomed to the pain from inflammatory bowel disease. But the headache baffled her. Unfortunately, the headache soon [...]
That optimism came from a 24-year-old woman who just the year previously had her life turned upside down by a stroke. Now, more than two years later, Alex's positivity has only grown as she continues to make remarkable progress in her recovery. In December 2012, Alex was just getting [...]
Catherine Zalewski knew right away that she was having a stroke. She just wasn’t able to tell anyone around her. Catherine, who was Miss New Jersey in 2011, was working at her gym as a personal trainer on the morning of July 30 when she suddenly began feeling “very strange,” [...]
Lydia Arana, 79, is a soft-spoken woman, living with Parkinson’s disease but not willing to let it keep her down. The Matawan resident was diagnosed with the degenerative neurological disease in 2007 and has lived with fluctuating levels of intense tremors for years, but last year she started the [...]
