By Chris Maccini
Cover photo courtesy TJ Sulzle
TJ Sulzle’s connection to the mountains of the Inland Northwest began before he was born. In 1963, when Schweitzer Mountain opened, his dad was head of the ski patrol. Sulzle grew up an avid skier, and each time he needed new gear, his family turned to Sports Creel, the locally owned, Spokane Valley ski shop.
“Every Christmas present was a set of skis from Sports Creel engraved with my name on them,” Sulzle says. “While I was in high school, I was kind of the young guy that hung out at the shop. Me and Micah, the owner, became friends.” The Spokane area’s oldest specialty ski shop, Sports Creel was opened in 1954 by Micah Genteman’s grandfather, Harry Larned. Today, Micah and his wife TJ Genteman own and operate the store.
After high school, Sulzle moved to Park City, Utah, with dreams of making the Olympic ski team. He ended up working for more than a decade as a ski instructor and ski guide, leading trips in mountains all over the world. During the summer months, he returned to the Northwest to work landscaping jobs around Spokane and North Idaho.
Ski guiding may sound like a dream job, but the lifestyle wasn’t without its drawbacks. During those years, Sulzle developed an addiction to alcohol and opioids. Eventually, he married, had a son, moved back to the Spokane area, and gave up the guiding life. By the winter of 2020, Sulzle’s addictions had contributed to his marriage deteriorating. He was working to get sober and going through a divorce when he ran into a former high school classmate, a woman he hadn’t seen in more than 20 years. “Deerdra and I saw each other at Target, and long story short, I haven’t been away from her since,” Sulzle says. “We got married a year later.”
A few months after that meeting, Sulzle began to feel ill. He spiked a fever and “felt like his organs were shutting down.” Deerdra, who works as a secretary in Sacred Heart Hospital’s operating room, encouraged TJ to go to the emergency room. After a round of tests, they discovered that Sulzle’s body was in sepsis, his liver showed signs of cirrhosis, and his spleen was enlarged. He spent ten days in the hospital.
Sacred Heart’s staff stabilized Sulzle’s condition, and he began to feel better. He went back to work that summer, building rock walls and other features at homes around the Inland Northwest. But despite his best efforts to work through the discomfort, Sulzle was still sick. He ended up back in the hospital several times, and had multiple surgeries over the course of the next two years, with no answer about the underlying cause of his illness.
In May of 2022, Sulzle was back in the emergency room yet again, and this time was referred to a blood specialist. They drew some blood and kept him in the hospital overnight. The next morning, Deerdra had just arrived to check on him, when a nurse came into the room.
“The nurse looked at both of us and said, ‘I don’t know if they’ve talked to you about what I’m giving you, but this is an oral chemo pill. And we’re moving you to the oncology floor.’” Sulzle says. “And we’re like, what?”
At the age of 43, Sulzle had been diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a rare form of blood cancer in which the body produces too many red blood cells. Doctors put him on an aggressive chemotherapy treatment, which required daily visits to Cancer Care Northwest for blood draws and other tests. But they struggled to get his overactive blood production under control.
Meanwhile, Sulzle’s spleen—the organ responsible for filtering and removing old red blood cells—continued to enlarge under the strain. By the fall of 2022, his spleen was so large that it had dislocated his ribs, and he couldn’t bend without excruciating pain. Sulzle saw several specialists, both in Spokane and at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, but none had a conclusive answer for why his condition wasn’t responding to treatment.
Fed up with the pain and unable to ski or do any of the other activities he enjoyed, Sulzle asked his doctors whether removing his spleen was an option. An oncologist at Fred Hutch suggested that it might be, but every surgeon Sulzle talked to refused to do the operation. The risks of complications—or even death—were too high. Once again, he appealed to Deerdra.
“I came home from Seattle—this was like November 2022, right before Thanksgiving—and I told my wife, ‘Find me the best surgeon at Sacred Heart for doing stuff like this.’ I told her I didn’t want to live anymore if I couldn’t do what I loved.”
Deerdra did her research and ultimately connected Sulzle with Dr. Timothy Bax, a local surgeon who agreed to remove the enlarged spleen. But while Sulzle had health insurance, the surgery would be expensive. And even if the risky procedure was successful, Sulzle wouldn’t be able to work during his recovery.
Throughout this years-long ordeal, Sulzle had continued to work as much as he could, doing everything possible to pay his mounting medical bills and keep his family afloat financially. But at a certain point, his illness rendered him unable to do the physically demanding work of landscaping. That’s when Micah Genteman of the Sports Creel stepped in, giving Sulzle a job tuning skis.
The ski shop was busy, heading into the Christmas season. Between boot fittings and ski tunings Sulzle talked with his old friend Micah about his treatment options. “I said, the surgeon said he can take it out, but I’m going to be down for about two months. I can’t afford to do that right now. I’m like, I’ll just live like this for a little while, maybe wait until spring.” What happened next is what happens with the outdoor community comes together to support one of their own. Micah Genteman explains what they decided to do.
“We had a quick team meeting here in the store. Once we learned the severity of it and I heard him say that he wasn’t going to go forward with some of that care, we quickly decided that we needed to step in and do something to take care of our friend,” Genteman says. “We knew that we’d have the help of our community and we’d be able to pitch in what we could.”
Micah and the team at Sports Creel devised the idea of a raffle. Anyone who chipped in to help raise money for Sulzle’s surgery would be entered into a drawing for a full ski setup: any pair of skis, boots, bindings, and poles in the store. Word went out to their community via Facebook, and the support poured in.
On Christmas Eve, just two days after Sulzle and Genteman had that conversation in the ski shop, Micah and TJ Genteman came to Sulzle with a surprise. “They pulled me in the back and said, ‘We kind of did a thing two days ago,’” Sulzle says. “‘We started a raffle. It’s gonna end on the day after Christmas, but we’re already up to $5,000.’ They were doing it to get us to where we could support ourselves for a couple months so I could get this surgery.”
The raffle raised over $7,000. Thanks to those funds, Sulzle was able to get the surgery in January 2023 and take the time off he needed to heal from the procedure. Sulzle’s spleen weighed nine pounds when it was removed, over 20 times the size of a healthy organ. His doctors told him they’d never seen anything like it.
The spleen surgery didn’t solve all of Sulzle’s health issues. Soon, he was back in the hospital with severe chest pains and abnormally high platelet counts. But this time, they found a drug combination that helped. He started to feel better. On Schweitzer’s closing weekend in the spring of 2023, he got back on skis for the first time in years.
These days, Sulzle is back at work as a landscaping foreman for Clearwater Summit Group. He’s still on medications to treat the cancer, but he’s hoping for test results this fall that will indicate the illness is in full remission. And, of course, he’s looking forward to the upcoming ski season. Most importantly though, he’s thankful to the community that rallied to support him.
“My wife has been the biggest rock you could imagine. She made me feel like myself again after addiction and alcoholism. She took care of me when I was sick, and we’re thriving today,” Sulzle says. “And what Micah, TJ, and the Sports Creel did for me—somebody that just started out as one of their customers. They made it possible for me to get a surgery that saved my life.”
Chris Maccini is a writer and audio producer from Spokane. This winter, he’s looking forward to shredding some fresh powder on Schweitzer’s slopes and some fresh groomed corduroy on Mt. Spokane’s Nordic trails.
