He Wants To Ride His Bicycle – For A Good Cause
By Mitch Berg
My friend Beeeej is going to be doing a mega bike-a-thon. It’s for a very good cause:
Six years ago, less than a year after I moved to New York City to be closer to my parents, my mother was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. None of us really knew at the time what that meant; we knew that leukemia was a form of blood cancer, but we didn’t know her prognosis, or even really that there were different kinds of the disease. I’ll write more about CLL in later entries, but for now suffice to say we knew her life would change.
We have been very fortunate, far more fortunate than many families of leukemia patients, in that my mother’s life hasn’t changed all that much; she has remained relatively healthy. CLL can remain relatively inactive – or at least advance very, very slowly – for several years, and with Mom it has done just that. As I said, it’s been six years – and she’s not only still with us, she’s still in pretty good health, and hasn’t had to undergo any kind of medical treatment. Not everybody is so lucky, and so we count every day with her as a blessing.
What does that have to do with Tucson?
Tonight I spent a couple of hours at the registration and kick-off for the New York City chapter of Team in Training. “TNT” is an arm of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, through which ordinary people sign up to do extraordinary things to raise money for the Society’s programs – medical research, government lobbying, patient services, and all the other things that are desperately needed in the fight against blood cancers. TNT members spend months training to run a marathon, bike/swim/run a triathlon, or bike a “century,” and they use the event as a catalyst to raise money from their friends and family.
And tonight I committed myself to spend the next six months training, so that I can ride my bike in “El Tour de Tucson” – one hundred and nine miles in and around the city of Tucson, Arizona in one day, November 17, 2007.
I hope you’ll check in with me often over the next six [now more like three!] months. It should be an interesting ride.
I know Beeeej would appreciate any help people can spare toward his goal of raising almost $11K to help combat Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, I imagine he’d appreciate it.
As would, y’know, all the rest of the CLL patients.
I’m going to try to chip loose a few bucks, and I hope you can too.
