For Larry, turning 74 comes with a full calendar and a full heart. His retired life in Summerville is less about slowing down and more about keeping pace with what matters most. Larry and his wife, Joanne, are raising their 12-year-old grandson, whose baseball schedule keeps them on the move most weekends. Their days are a mix of school drop-offs, practice runs, tournament weekends and all the everyday tasks – cooking, cleaning, mowing the lawn – that make a house a home. “We keep ourselves pretty busy,” Larry says with a grin.
But in late 2022, that rhythm was disrupted when Larry’s back, which had given him minor trouble for years, finally gave way. “I’d always had some back issues,” he explains. “But after I retired, I wasn’t sitting all the time anymore, and my back had been great for quite a while. Then I had a couple of operations for other issues, lost a lot of muscle tone, and that’s when the real problems started.”
It began subtly: numbness in his left big toe and a right foot that sometimes just wouldn’t cooperate. But by December, the signals were impossible to ignore. A friend recommended he reach out to Dr. Brian Cuddy, a neurosurgeon at Roper St. Francis Healthcare. Larry’s wife, a retired nurse, accompanied him to every appointment, filling in the blanks when his natural tendency to “dance around the issue” left gaps.
The diagnosis was serious. “They told me three of my vertebrae had discs extruding out and pressing on the nerves going to my legs,” Larry recalls. “My right foot wasn’t giving me balance feedback. My left leg wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.” The imaging team was startled by how severe the compression was. “They were kind of surprised I was even walking,” he says.
The plan was clear: surgery, followed by intensive physical therapy. But life doesn’t pause for medical timelines. The operation was scheduled for early February, until Larry realized he couldn’t wait. “I called the PA and said, ‘My left leg isn’t working, my right foot’s going numb.’ They moved the surgery up to December 28.”
That decision proved critical. Just days before the procedure, while visiting family in Texas for Christmas, Larry answered the doorbell and his body betrayed him. “I turned to walk to the door, and my left leg just didn’t respond. I bent my knees and kind of lowered myself down, slid across the kitchen floor,” he laughs. Joanne walked in at that moment, “Larry, what are you doing on the floor?” It was a lighthearted moment that underscored a serious truth: it was time.
The morning of surgery, Larry was calm. “Joanne and I were completely satisfied with the doctor’s explanation of what was going to happen. They answered all our questions. When they wheeled me into the operating room, I saw all the technology and I was totally at ease. I wasn’t nervous at all.”
The procedure was complex: laminating two vertebrae, inserting a clamp and trimming away the disc material compressing his nerves. Recovery was grueling. “There’s no sugarcoating it,” Larry admits. “It was painful and uncomfortable at first. But as time went on and I kept exercising, it got much, much better. If I hadn’t kept up with the bands, the lifting, all the exercises, I’d still be walking around with a walker.”
Today, the results are tangible in every step he takes. “I can walk without restriction. Long distances, long periods of time. I can mow the yard, garden, help out at baseball practice. I have a 20-pound weight limit, and that’s okay. There’s no pain from everyday stuff. I’m very lucky, very fortunate that I had the doctors and the hospital system I had. Everything went smoothly and turned out just the way it should.”
For Larry, the true measure of recovery isn’t in medical milestones but in moments: throwing a baseball with his grandson, pitching at batting practice, walking the grocery store aisles with Joanne and discovering something new to cook together. “I am not a sit-around-the-house, watch-TV-all-day kind of guy,” he says. “It’s very important to me to participate in his life, in our marriage, in our family. That’s everything.”
When asked what he’d recommend to anyone with back pain, his answer is immediate. “Roper St. Francis. Hands down. The doctors, the nurses, the facilities, the aftercare – everything was fabulous. The whole experience was wonderful. And here I am, totally functional and living my good life again.”
Larry’s story isn’t just about a spine surgery. It’s about the intersection of medicine and meaning: how a team of skilled hands and advanced technology gave a grandfather the simple, extraordinary gift of playing catch with his grandson, of carrying groceries in with his wife, of sliding across the kitchen floor – this time on his own terms.
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