When Sean Thomez (CHS 2014) was going through an academic rough patch on his way to earning a doctorate in physical therapy, he got back on track with the help of the very physician who had treated him for a brain tumor four years earlier.
Back in 2015, when Thomez was a freshman at Minnesota State University, Mankato, attending summer classes in order to get a jump start on his degree, he began experiencing vison problems.
“While taking trigonometry, I noticed that equations on the board started getting a little blurry. I didn’t think much of this as I was spending hours in classes and many more hours studying outside of class, so I thought I just needed to give my eyes a break. I began implementing study breaks to allow myself to go for walks and let my eyes rest, but my vision only worsened.”
Doctors discovered Thomez had a golf-ball-sized craniopharyngioma, a noncancerous cystic tumor, behind his eyes. In August, surgeons at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester performed a procedure that involved cutting his head from ear to ear to remove the tumor.
But the aggressive cell growth was stuck to critical structures in the brain, risking the function of Thomez’s hypothalamus, pituitary gland and optic nerves. When the tumor regrew quickly after surgery, his physicians added 30 proton beam therapy sessions to his treatment plan.
Although he had to take a semester off to undergo the six weeks of treatment, Thomez still completed a B.S. degree in Exercise Science, with a dual minor in Sports Medicine and Psychology, in four years.
Receiving additional inspiration and conviction to become a doctor of physical therapy while he was a patient in the St. Mary’s hospital, Thomez returned to Rochester when he was accepted as a doctoral student at Mayo Clinic School of Health Sciences (MCSHS).
But his studies didn’t go well.
“When I was just starting graduate school, I began experiencing severe and frequent headaches and migraines. Due to the consistent pain, I was always fatigued, yet I slept very little due to the pain and stress of graduate school. I was often very ill, and because of all of this, my grades started slipping. To make a long and painful story short, I was ultimately kicked out of the MCSHS for poor academic performance.”
Thomez was feeling the effects of radiation therapy, something his radio-oncologist, Dr. Nadia Laack, said could persist over the next 5 years.
“It turns out that I had been suffering drops in hormone levels and a commonly experienced delayed reaction post radiation to the brain,” Thomez explained.
But thanks to the help and support of both his fiancé and his radio-oncologist, who wrote a letter to the head of the physical therapy program explaining his situation and educating him further on the effects of radiation to the brain, Thomez was able to appeal the program’s decision and was readmitted with support and approval from the resident of the MCSHS.
Although it wasn’t always smooth sailing, and he continued to struggle through a difficult program, just like his colleagues did, Thomez got back on track and, last spring, graduated with an outstanding 3.58 GPA.
While Thomez still copes with aftereffects of his treatment: frequent and sometimes exhausting headaches, dry skin and medicines to address hormonal complication, his experience has taught him empathy for people who are ill or injured.
“I am happy with my ability to turn a bad situation into a good one.”
Now, Thomez wants to continue to learn more about different specialties of physical therapy and how other clinics and healthcare facilities operate when providing physical therapy.
“To do this and get a wide breadth of experience, I am going to become a traveling physical therapist. I will stay in Minnesota for my first couple of rotations, but I would like to start venturing out of state eventually.”
Next fall, Thomez will marry his girlfriend of six years, now a Medical Laboratory Scientist at the Mayo Clinic.
“She has been instrumental in me achieving what I have thus far. She has supported me every step of the way. We met during our undergraduate studies and formed a strong relationship in Chemistry 201 and 202. You could say we had… ‘chemistry.’”
Photo courtesy of Sean Thomez.