Vanessa Etienne is an Emerging Content Writer-Reporter for PEOPLE.
A father of three considered himself a "super healthy" individual until he was hospitalized with an aggressive tumor on his spine.
Steve Loutzenhiser -- a high school teacher from St. Peters, Missouri -- struggled with excruciating back pain in the fall of 2024.
"I felt like I was getting stabbed in the back at night when I was trying to sleep," the 41-year-old told Today. "Incredibly sharp pain right between my shoulder blades in one specific spot."
When the pain persisted for several weeks, Loutzenhiser's chiropractor urged him to get an MRI, which led to a shocking diagnosis.
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In December 2024, Loutzenhiser met with Dr. Camilo Molina, a Washington University neurosurgeon at the Siteman Cancer Center, to review his scans. He learned that his MRI showed an ependymoma, a "locally aggressive" benign tumor on his spinal cord close to the base of his neck.
"They are entirely random," Molina told the outlet. "He's young, healthy, athletic, conscientious. Never had a really major health problem in his life, thinking that [he's] doing everything right. And then all of a sudden, something like this really completely disrupts your life in a somewhat catastrophic fashion."
Symptoms include back pain, balance issues, blurry vision, dizziness, headaches, muscle weakness, numbness in the arms and legs, seizures and more.
In addition to Loutzenhiser's back pain that landed him in the hospital, he also unknowingly suffered from Lhermitte's sign, a symptom characterized by an electric shock-like sensation that occurs on flexion of the neck and radiates down the spine and through the arms and legs, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Loutzenhiser recalled that whenever he sneezed, he would get "an electrical burst" out of his elbows and knees. He also dealt with numbness around the sides of his torso. Following his diagnosis, Loutzenhiser learned that if his tumor continued to grow, he would lose sensation and balance, which could progress to a loss of strength, coordination and urinary incontinence.
"It was lots of tears, lots of, 'What does this mean?'" his wife Jackie, 41, said of his diagnosis. "I just kept thinking, I don't know how we do this without him. This family does not work without him in it."
"Never in a million years did either one of us think that it could have been a tumor," Loutzenhiser added. "It was a lot of very grim thoughts."
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Molina gave Loutzenhiser two options moving forward: monitor the tumor and his symptoms or remove it immediately with a risky surgery. "I don't think that I could have mentally been able to handle knowing that it was in there," he admitted.
Loutzenhiser had the surgery on Jan. 7, and Molina said the procedure was "almost like defusing a bomb in little, tiny pieces."
"If you push it too much, they're permanently paralyzed. But if you don't push it enough, then you leave a big part of the tumor in there," Molina added, noting that he was able to successfully remove the tumor.
After such a difficult surgery, it took Loutzenhiser about a month to relearn to walk on his own. He's now on the road to recovery, thanking all the medical staff that have helped him along the way.
"It's been like a decade worth of experiences in four months," he told the outlet.