Monroe High School senior Sami Hughes, 16, was diagnosed with scoliosis during a routine screening in elementary school. She wore a series of back braces for three years to correct the curvature in her spine, but the treatment wasn’t a permanent fix. When back pain threatened to sideline her [...]
As someone with diabetes, Theresa Falcicchio knew to track her blood sugar, take her medication, and check her feet for sores. However, it didn’t take long for a seemingly minor blister to snowball into a serious condition that threatened to take her leg. On a warm fall day at [...]
Joe Holden isn’t a quitter. After six spine surgeries and countless hours of traditional physical therapy in eight years, the Manalapan resident still needed a wheelchair to get around. For Joe, that wasn’t living. Joe suffers from spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that puts pressure on [...]
Julia Schleuss was a trailblazer when she joined the boys’ wrestling team at Wall Township High School. However, when she broke her collarbone during a match this winter, she was concerned that she might never wrestle again. Julia, 16, decided in eighth grade that she wanted to join the [...]
While Tony Yodice isn’t from Philadelphia, he feels like Rocky Balboa twice a week. The 79-year-old Monroe resident is fighting the effects of Parkinson’s disease through boxing—and he’s winning. Tony was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease five years ago after noticing tremors in his hand. Parkinson’s disease is an incurable [...]
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 [...]
Barbara Engler hasn’t been the same since falling off her horse onto a stone wall when she was 14. Then compression fractures in her spine that resulted from a car accident, paired with arthritis, meant living with back pain of varying degrees for decades. She tried different procedures in [...]
Brian Giacchi has experienced muscle spasms off and on since age 9. When the condition ramped up in his 20s, he sought medical advice. Unfortunately, several years of doctors’ visits, testing, and frustration failed to solve the mystery. Then finally, at age 34, he got an answer: he had [...]
Unbearable, debilitating, and disabling are just some of the ways that Krisda Abene, 43, used to describe her menstrual periods. The mother of three from Jamesburg began suffering from painful periods in her 20s, but it was after she had her third child at age 27 that her symptoms [...]
A few years ago, Walter “Bud” Burch’s wife, Kathy, found him on the kitchen floor writhing in pain. He had to be carried to their truck before being driven to the emergency department. Suffering from a chronic condition called trigeminal neuralgia, Bud lived with this kind of intense pain [...]
