After returning home from my wonderfully foolish tour through Europe last year, I felt amazing, unstoppable, and also restless and poor. So I moved thousands of kilometres away from my adopted home, to a place renowned for its cheap rent and terrible health care system, and then found out I had cancer.

My friends have all been getting pregnant, not cancer. I guess someone had to be the statistic, that 0.02%. Or maybe I'd rather be the 1%? Whichever way you manipulate the numbers, my diagnosis was unexpected and 100% unwelcome.

Treatment was simple: a surprisingly easy surgery, followed by a traumatic hospital stay (brightened only by an old guy who challenged me to a race while we were both shuffling around with our uncooperative IV carts), followed by a lifetime of medication and monitoring. With a 99%+ survival rate, everyone expected me to be perfectly fine after surgery, instantly back to normal; even my doctors weren't interested in my ongoing symptoms, so I have no idea if my new normal is, in fact, normal. Considering my cancer caused no symptoms whatsoever but its treatment gave me a chronic illness, it was isolating to have people insist I should be feeling better after surgery than before.

I had been toying with the idea of touring as soon as I could get away, but there were obstacles: I was tired and weak, I wasn't responding well to exercise, and I still can't cope with the knowledge that my inaccessible doctors now control my ability to live. My days of carefree long-term travel were finished when my surgeon cut out that traitorous, essential piece of my body.

To top it all off, when I first started riding my bicycle again, it was like I had never been on a bicycle before. No balance, no control, not even enough grip strength to stop the bike when braking. If I couldn't even manage an unloaded bike, how could I throw 50 lbs of gear on it? There was no way I could tour.

Heart

1

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

I wanted to write a story involving a broken toilet in my apartment; the previous tenant who had tried to move said toilet; my decrepit, dying landlord and his high-strung wife; with a twist at the end where I found out my landlord's chronic breathing difficulties were partly caused by his having the same cancer as me. Not exactly the same: mine was repeatedly (and inaccurately) dismissed by my surgeon as "very, very small," whereas my landlord was given six hours to live and told that it would take eight hours to move him to a hospital that could do the surgery. He survived that somehow, and lived for another couple decades.

I planned to write about his feeling of never being able to get enough air and to link that feeling to my needing to get out of here and prove to myself that I could still do things like go on bicycle tours.

Unfortunately, I have since learned many fascinating and disturbing details about the previous tenant, the landlord, and the wife (now widow) which I think it would be inappropriate to write about, plus the insanity of it all is tragically beyond the scope of a bicycle touring journal.

Of course, I very cleverly managed to tell the story in the process of explaining why I couldn't, thus sparing myself the trouble of coming up with a different idea for an introduction. It's not because I'm lazy--okay, maybe a little--it's just that it has been a lonely, shitty year and I'd rather tell you about the neighbourhood drama instead of that new pothole on the way to the hospital.

I'm probably not ready to tour. I certainly don't have the medical support I need to give me confidence in my body. I have symptoms I'd never experienced prior to surgery, random days where my body just won't cooperate, and lately I've felt compelled to take afternoon naps. I can't even train properly because it's stupidly hot and humid here.

This tour is a really bad idea, right?

Well, maybe not. The worst that can happen is having to quit.

The best that can happen is getting out of this dreary swamp of a city, getting into nature, immersing myself in fresh air and quiet nights, being delightfully cold for a change, learning what my new abilities are, possibly even helping my recovery. Staying home and feeling trapped isn't going to do anything positive for me.

I think I can do this. After all, I managed to get Schwalbe Marathon tires onto my rims. All other hurdles seem like mere speed bumps in comparison to that monumental effort, at least until my first flat tire.