Climbs: Loretto Backside

Not far from our house is one of the best climbs in the city of Denver. I named it "Loretto Backside" after the old name of the nearby college campus, Loretto Heights. The Backside begins at Knox and Hampden and climbs for just under a mile.  There is an elevation gain of about 200 feet over that distance which works out to an average grade of about 4%. Don't let that number fool you.  The Backside qualifies as a Categorty 5 climb.  It  starts out easy, but gets progressively steeper reaching a brutal 20% grade in the last third of a mile.  It's a great climb, a fantastic workout, and one of the most challenging short climbs I know of. I make this climb regularly as a part of two commuting routes I take home.  The Backside looms over the last few miles of my commute, so when I get to the bottom I'm warmed up and ready for some work. And the Backside provides it. I take it slow, staying in the saddle until I pass Dartmouth where I stand up and "dance" the rest of the way to the summit.   My ass is pretty much kicked by the time I get there. And it feels great. Although I'm not a great or strong climber, I still get a lot of satisfaction from making a tough climb like Loretto Backside.

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If you find yourself on Bear Creek Trail and want challenge to liven up the ride, simply turn north when Bear Creek crosses Lowell, cross Hampden, and head on up

Some People Collect Stamps ....

.... and I get to collect cancers.

Lovely

We all know about the Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma I have.  About a year ago my doctor diagnosed me with two more.  One is a Basal-Cell Carcinoma and the other is a Squamous-Cell Carcinoma.  Both are skin cancers. Both are related to sun exposure.  They're fairly common.

I decided i really didn't want to know a whole lot about these additions to my "collection".  I just wanted the fucking things gone.  Fortunately these cancers are fairly easy to deal with.  I had the Basal-Cell and one occurrence of of the Squamous removed late last summer.  I had another Squamous-Cell removed from my right temple just the other day.

I went through what's called "Mohs Surgery".  It's fairly straightforward.  They numb you up with Lidocaine.  In my case they used a Lidocaine cocktail of sorts, tailored to reduce the bleeding that would occur because of the Coumadin I take.  Anyway, they numb you up, and then proceed to cut away the affected skin.  They bandage you up and send you back to the waiting room for a couple hours while they send the tissue to the lab for analysis.  If the lab says they got all of the cancer, they stitch or staple you up and send you home.  If the think some cancer was missed, they repeat the process and continue with that until they get it all.

They got mine on the first try.

So they stitched me up.  They had removed an area about the size an almond.  Fortunately the doctor is a plastic surgeon and does a great job making sure I don't end up looking like Frankenstein's monster.  They covered it with a dressing that made it look like I'd been gun-shot, gave me a prescription for Vicodin and sent me home with instructions.

The instructions were of the usual sort.  They included things like keep the area dry, no bending over, keep my blood pressure down ......

And stay off the bike.  For two weeks.

Two fucking weeks.

I was pissed.  Bad enough to loose a day's pay to have somebody dig a almond-sized hunk of flesh off your head.  But to leave the office with instructions to cease a beneficial and fun activity was bordering on the intolerable.  I have a couple centuries in June to train for.  The weather is starting to warm up.  It's glorious out there, and I'm stuck with doctors orders to take it easy.

Bullshit.

But what can you do?

You contemplate your growing collection of cancers and follow doctor's orders.

Bastard.

On the bright side it's less that two weeks till I'm back in the saddle.  I have a dressing change on Friday and maybe the doctor will see that I'm healing beautifully, relent, and let me get back on the bike.

With my luck they'll want to biopsy a suspicious spot on the other side of my face and plan the next Mohs Surgery.

I can hardly wait.

Zero-Sum

Cancer sucks.

Having cancer sucks even more.

For me the suckage comes from a persistent frustration.  I don't feel sick.  I'm not in any pain.  I'm not symptomatic.  I'm not going though chemo or radiation therapy.  It would be the Best Of All Possible Worlds if it wasn't so damned frustrating.  This frustration seems to come from a knowledge that this whole cancer .... thing ...... is going nowhere.  It's not growing or spreading.  We are simply watching it, and waiting for it to grow, or spread to the point where something must be done.  In the meantime, life goes on, pretty much as usual, with the difference being that I know there's a cancer in my body and it's not going away.  There's nothing to do except wait for some event, some indeterminate point in the future, when the shit will finally hit the fan and something will get done.

I hate waiting - waiting for that indeterminate date to arrive.

That's where the frustration comes from.

It's not like I look forward to that day.  The thought of having poison pumped into my body, or my guts burned up from the radiation is repugnant.  Repulsive.

I also understand ..... or believe ..... that day is inevitable.   Sooner or later, my oncologist will say the magic words ....

I think we should start you on some chemo.

The frustration will evaporate, to be replaced by fear - or at least that's what I'm afraid of.

Having a port installed, being nauseated and sick to my stomach all the time, hair falling out, chemo brain, it all scares me and it'll get scarier when it actually begins.  That's what I'm afraid of and it's always there in the back of my mind.  It haunts me.  It frustrates me.

That sucks.  Out loud.

Sometimes I feel lucky that despite the cancer, I still have a reasonable level of good health.  Then I feel guilty when I think about the people I know who have been though things far worse with cancer than what I'm going through.  It's back and forth and back and forth in a perverse zero-sum game I play with myself.  One minute I feel pretty good about things, and the next I feel like shit about it.

And that, I guess, is my karma.

I've been painting a rather bleak picture and for that, gentle reader, I aplogize.  My life isn't non-stop misery.  Having cancer, even a low-grade malignancy like mine is frustrating, but I've found ways to cope.  Perhaps one day soon I'll write about it.

Good has come of it.  I feel I've learned a little something about compassion.  I ponder my own situation and then I consider Shelly, and Jody, and Andy, and Rob and Kelly's wife and all the others who have been through worse than I, and I find in myself a heart that is softer, gentler, and more available than it used to be.  If I'm frustrated by my situation, how must they feel about what they are going, or have gone, through?  How can there not be a place in my heart for these friends, and I wonder, did it take cancer for me to find that place?

Is this the upside of a zero-sum game?

And that thought frustrates as well.