Josh’s Fighting Journey – Brain Cancer and Learning to Walk Again

Watch Josh share his story

When Josh stopped at a traffic light on the way home from seeing Top Gun with his young son, he could immediately tell something was wrong as he was overcome by a wave of dizziness.

“Should probably just go get it checked out,” Josh said about his frame of mind at this point. “Something wasn’t right.”

His intuition was correct – something was indeed off.

“The doctors ordered a CT scan,” Josh remembered. “And they found a large mass on there – some type of glioma.”

He would find out after a biopsy that it was, in fact, a cancerous tumor.

“The good news is that they were able to get the entire tumor out, which was great,” Josh said. “But there was a consequence to that – best case I would likely walk with a cane my entire life. Worst case, you know, would be wheelchair-bound.”

Josh however, a former military pilot, chose to always display an impressively positive outlook as he worked with the teams from TriHealth Neuroscience and Mayfield Brain & Spine.

“When you’re going through life and death and you’ve got young kids and a wife... you’ll take what you can get,” he said. “And I was very grateful for that.”

Fortunately for Josh, his story didn’t end there.

He checked into the TriHealth Rehabilitation Hospital soon after his surgery, and it didn’t take long for Josh to get to work.

“They had a whole plan,” he said. “Physical therapy, occupational therapy, I did speech therapy – everything there.”

And while Josh deserves all the credit in the world for the work he did in rehab, he says it wouldn’t be right to not give the team members who helped him through his therapy some credit too.

“The hardest working people and the best care,” he said excitedly. “They got me up on my feet and I’m trying to walk, but they’re down there lifting my feet and taking steps – this is hard work.”

Josh even said that he was inspired to work harder himself by simply seeing how hard the team members were working to support him.

“Just that little bit motivated me to work harder,” he said. “I see her down there working hard lifting my foot, so I’d better pick up the pace and put in the work too.”

Looking back, Josh couldn’t be happier with his care team.

“I attribute a lot of my success of where I am today was the people at the rehab hospital,” he said. “I end up coming in in an ambulance, in a stretcher, into a bed – and I walked out.”

Learn more about the wonderful work being done at the TriHealth Rehabilitation Hospital or the TriHealth Cancer & Blood Institute today!