Todd Grimes rings the bell after finishing his chemotherapy treatment in January 2023.
Submitted photo
Todd Grimes watched as his father Chuck died of pancreatic cancer in 2018, so when Todd was diagnosed with the same illness four years later, he feared the worst.
But after being given only a year to be expected to live, Todd is going strong nearly 2 1/2 years later. He has resumed running and plans to do the 5K at next weekend’s Mill Race Marathon.
“It turned out that they were wrong,” Todd said. “All the spots they saw on my liver and my lungs after more biopsies, they found out those weren’t cancerous, and it was isolated to my pancreas. I’m, I wouldn’t say, ‘Cured,’ but I’m in remission for now. I think the nature of pancreatic cancer is, it’s usually lethal, and I think that’s why they assumed at the hospital I had a year to live. They just assumed, ‘This guy has pancreatic cancer,’ so everything they saw in my liver and lungs, they just assumed it was cancer, it was caught so late.”
Todd played football and baseball at Columbus North, graduating in 1986. He started to play football at Hanover College, but injured his patella before the first game and was done with the sport.
After graduation from Hanover, Todd taught U.S. History and Psychology at Hauser for 15 years. He then taught for a few years in Indianapolis Public Schools before moving on to Greenfield-Central, where he is now in his ninth year teaching mostly math at The Academy at Greenfield-Central, which is an alternative school.
Feeling out of shape a decade ago, he began running.
“I was always a basketball, baseball, football guy, and for me to ever become a runner was kind of strange because it was nothing I would have ever predicted,” he said. “Fall of 2014, I was getting out of shape mentally and physically. Hanover did a 5K for their homecoming, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll try to get in shape and do that.’ That was my first one, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I never would have guessed. I do it just as much for my mental health as my physical health.”
Todd Grimes poses with some of his awards from running races.
Submitted photo
Over the next few years, Todd ran nine marathons and about 25 half marathons. He once did five 26.2-mile marathons in one year.
“Before I got sick, I would say I was addicted to running, and maybe I was doing too much,” he said. “I’m doing less than half as much as I was before I got sick.”
That sickness started in April of 2022.
“I was at school one day and had been battling what I thought was maybe a stomach virus for a week,” he said. “It’s kind of comical now because I tried to treat pancreatic cancer with antacid. I just thought I had sickness that was going around school. So one morning at school, a few kids told me, ‘Mr. Grimes, your eyes look yellow.’ Then, a couple kids even told me I look like the Grinch. So I went and looked in the bathroom, and sure enough, my eyes were yellow, so I took off from school that day to go to Prompt Med, and Prompt Med said, ‘You have more going on than what we can do for you.’ So then I went to the emergency room, and several scans later, they came back and told me I had a mass on my pancreas.”
“I think everybody at that point knew what that meant because just a few years prior, that’s what Dad died of — pancreatic cancer.”
Todd, who had driven himself from Greenfield to the Prompt Med in Columbus, had a cousin take him to St. Francis in Indianapolis.
“By that night, I was sort of glow-in-the-dark yellow, I was so jaundiced,” he said. “It was probably two or three days after that and several biopsies later that they confirmed that it was pancreatic cancer, and told me I had a year to live, and that was with the most aggressive chemo possible.”
Todd underwent chemotherapy, then had the “Whipple Procedure,” where in September 2022, surgeons took out most of his pancreas, his gall bladder, most of his small intestine and his bile duct and rerouted things. Then, he went through more chemo.
His last chemo was in January 2023. Now 56, he goes through scans of bloodwork every three months at St. Francis.
“Luckily, my oncologist here had reason to believe, she thought I was young enough and in good enough shape, she thought, ‘Well, maybe the stuff on the liver and your lungs aren’t cancer,’” he said. “So she ordered more biopsies and tests, and sure enough, they weren’t.”
Todd is on school board for Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp., and through the school foundation, started on a 5K in honor of his father and another former teacher, Ross Wallace, starting in 2019, called “Good, Better, Best.” That was last race Todd ran in April 2022 before getting sick and first race he ran post-chemo in April 2023.
“There was a time when I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to move much at all anymore or maybe do a little bit of walking here and there and maybe some biking,” he said. “But I’m back to running now, or actually more of a run-walk combination. A lot more biking and a little bit of hiking out in nature and in the gym a little bit more doing the rowing machine and elliptical. I’m still moving.
“I don’t particularly care for the term, ‘New normal,’” he added. “For lack of a better term, I’m still kind of figuring out what is a new normal for me. What should I be feeling? I’ll never feel the same as I did before I got sick.”
Todd is fortunate to have his wife Kami, daughter Megan Murray and four grandsons who live here in Columbus, and the support of his son Adam, who lives in Vermont.
“I’m looking to hopefully retire here in the next handful of years or so,” Todd said. “The future, though, is nothing I take for granted anymore. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t think about my mortality.”
Even though he’s only been running for the better part of 10 years, that is a big part of who he is today.
“Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind going out that way,” he said. “It sounds kind of weird, but I’d just as soon keel over when I was out running a race or hiking a trail or running the People Trail here in Columbus. That way, I would be going out doing something I enjoy and derive a sense of peace from.”
