News Around The Boards - Todd Marquis by Lacey Sachet

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News Around The Boards - Todd Marquis
by Lacey Sachet, Team IronLife.com Staff Writer & Admin @ www.ProActiveHealthNet.com



Benching his bodyweight 30 times for fun and a free Animal Shak hat. Picture compliments of the Animal Shak website.

Todd Marquis has regrets about being a bully in his youth, but his evil deeds ceased when he opened himself to better way in which to live his life. And as if that isn't enough, his near death sepsis and aortic homograft, complete with comeback.. truly is an inspirational story.

Story starts a little over 2 1/2 years ago. I had always aspired to play pro football. I played college ball at D-1AA Liberty University in Virginia and had several tryouts with AFL, CFL, and NFL Europe. I was in talks with a few NFL teams, but on the way to every single tryout, my car broke down. That is what you call a sign from God. I made it to one CFL tryout out of the whole bunch, and there was the top linebacker. However, they said that I did not have enough film for them, so I was commissioned to play minor league ball in Virginia. This is the picture of the bush leagues, but it got me the film I needed. Also, over the course of the next 12 months leading up to my next set of tryouts, I managed to naturally bulk to about 245-250 lbs pretty solid and ran a 4.59 forty yard dash. My bench press max was 505, and I intended to break the American record for the college 242-lb class at that summer's commonwealth games. I was in the shape of my life.

I never made it to those tryouts, and never made it to a bench press meet.

We still don't know how it happened. For months, we didn't even really know what it was. I was feeling a little ill at practice in late May of 2003, and my coach made me sit out, a prospect that I could not stand. He allowed me to continue only if I agreed to go to the hospital if I was feeling sick. That was the last thing I remembered for the next month. As I'm told by my then roommate, I came home from practice and my joints began to lock up and I was acting funny. I stayed up throughout the night hallucinating, and finally he took me to the hospital only to released the next day. Diagnosis: the flu. Within hours of returning home, I began showing the same symptoms, but this time they were worse. I began to lose motor functions. Every joint in my body had completely locked up, including the gliding joint of my collarbones. I could not move my fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders...and so on. I also was throwing up everywhere, hallucinating wildly and had fallen down in the hallway after a shower. My roommate, much to my protest, called 911 and the ambulance got me and I was taken back to the hospital. This time they had no idea what was wrong. The doctors literally hooked me up to about a dozen bags of medicine and fluids hoping at least one of them would work for this mystery illness.

To read more, please click here: http://www.ironlife.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67948