❤️ Softening my Lifelong Hurt, Pain & Fear | Mike Rilstone
Sharing is SO MUCH APPRECIATED!
Sadly, because I witnessed Mum suffer so much from cancer for almost one-third of her life, even the dreaded “C” word strikes fear and anxiety in me.
In the intervening years since cancer took Mum, I have lost count of the many family and friends it has also killed.
Way. Too. Many!
I’m not alone.
For instance, look at the annual baseball All-Star game. Every spectator and player is given a piece of cardboard and a pen. On it, they are asked to write the name of someone they have lost, losing, and/or suffering from cancer. In the 7th inning stretch, absolutely everyone in the stadium holds up their cardboard with a name or names. What a message!
My history of witnessing what this disease has done to so many I have loved explains why I have elected to spend my Senior years riding for the SickKids Foundation’s Great Cycle Challenge.
And yes, I have had cancer as well.
Remarkable testimonials (often from the kids themselves) explain how this annual cycling effort is helping children endure their personal fights against this heinous disease.
My annual cycling campaigns are also contributing to research to develop better treatments for all, not just the children.
Perhaps in my lifetime I will be fortunate to see my cycling, (which helps to continually fill the desperately needed fundraising pool of research funds), finally lead to all the cures.
Imagine that. That is the hope we all must share.
When I was 17, surgeons at the Montreal General Hospital removed a tumour the size of a grapefruit from Mum.
I was a teenager. It left me in fear, every single day, that I was going to lose Mum.
She survived for 14.5 years, but her ever-recurring cancer never allowed my fear and anxiety level to diminish.
Over those next 14.5 years, she had four more major surgeries to remove additional cancerous growths.
I never saw her tummy but she described it as looking like many railway tracks. She bore scars across her whole midsection.
Mum’s chemotherapy nurse explained that she had been the first chemotherapy patient in Montreal.
In the beginning during her chemo treatments in the 60’s, she was an in-patient for the whole five days they administered those highly toxic drugs.
She was the first human guinea pig and chemo drugs were much stronger in the early days.
During her long 14½ years fighting cancer, it seemed she was always going to the Montreal General for an infusion of more chemo drugs.
One of the greatest hurts for me is the memory of her lying in her casket at age 58. Cancer robbed her of all her Senior years and so much life.
So here I am at age 7-6, enjoying 18+ years she never had.
And all these thoughts and my decades of hurt, pain and fear are re-lived as I see the countless images published by the Sickkids Foundation of hairless children going through what Mum did.
I will never shirk and hide.
I will take on that pain.
I will ride every day for as long as I am able to help those kids.
Riding for them softens my lifelong hurt, pain and fear.
I’m doing it all in your memory Mum.
Hope you are proud.
Love,
Mike
—————-
If you would like to be one of my Sponsors this year, in my 6th year riding for the kids, here’s my Rider page:
https://greatcyclechallenge.ca/Riders/MichaelRilstone
Thank you!
Sharing is SO MUCH APPRECIATED!
