When Brittany and Todd Fuchs first started dating, Todd’s battle with chordoma felt like a part of his past. He had been diagnosed at age 25 and been through two surgeries and proton radiation, but by the time they met, he was stable and hadn’t had a recurrence in several years.
Then in 2013, one of Todd’s annual MRIs showed a recurrence. A neurosurgeon partially resected the tumor, but some of it had already invaded the outer lining of his brain. Todd again recovered and, after a stable six-month MRI, the couple moved from Florida to Stamford, Connecticut.
In August 2014, Brittany and Todd were married. A month later, Todd’s tumor returned with a vengeance: it was already twice the size of the one he had in 2013.
As Todd and Brittany pondered what to do, they found an invaluable resource in Josh Sommer, executive director of the Chordoma Foundation, and a chordoma survivor himself. “To say that Josh was incredible would be a complete understatement,” Brittany says. “As a result of how open he was and how much he helped us, my husband’s entire treatment was pivoted.”
After meeting with several neurosurgeons and oncologists, Todd decided he was sick of surgery and began treatment with an experimental targeted therapy. “We were lucky enough that by taking this pill once a day the tumor remained stable for a year,” Brittany notes. Then, on December 13, 2015, Todd had a stroke caused by the tumor.
The road back has been difficult, but Brittany has been amazed at – and proud of – her husband’s strength and determination to recover. “He’s incredible. He absolutely refused to be in rehab for New Year’s, so he did whatever he needed to to be home to celebrate! This man went from not being able to use the entire left side of his body, to walking out of rehab with a cane, in just two weeks!”
That was just the start, she laughs. “He went back to work three days after we got home. I was going to kill him! He got so frustrated with how slowly he walked, he bought a Segway scooter to ride around the office!”
Today, Todd is recovering well from the stroke; he is on a different targeted therapy and continues to get MRIs every few months. Aside from that, the couple strives to live as normal a life as possible. Together they own and operate a software development company, and Todd has recently become involved in his father’s financial services firm.
Brittany has become an active volunteer for the Chordoma Foundation, helping to plan meetings and conferences and to communicate with physicians.
A few years ago, the Fuchs family raised money for the Chordoma Foundation through a circus school Todd once ran. (Fun fact: He was once a fire-eater and trapeze artist who really, truly did run away to join the circus!) More recently, the family made a gift to the Chordoma Foundation to help fund an ambitious research partnership with the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to systematically uncover new therapeutic targets for chordoma.
But Brittany wanted to do even more, so she decided to volunteer in the laboratory at the Broad Institute where this research is taking place. Once a month, she drives up to Boston to help with testing of potential treatments in chordoma cells. “I look at these cells, and they look so harmless in their little test tubes. But in the back of my mind, I know that they really are threatening everything.”
“As a spouse, I do my best to make my husband comfortable and to create as nice a life as I possibly can for us,” Brittany says. “But when it comes down to it, it’s an incredibly helpless feeling. There’s not a whole lot you can do besides hold them, be there for them. By volunteering, I feel like I have a little bit more of an active role in trying to figure out what’s threatening my husband’s life.”