8th Annual RRRRRide Hard Breathe Easy Classic!

My grandfather attended Johns Hopkins Medical School. My aunt (his daughter) has long worked as an oncology nurse at Hopkins, and she told me about this ride and encouraged me to ride on their behalf.

With respect to lung cancer, my aunt told me that patients with lung cancer face a stigma when it comes to receiving assistance with care, like they "did it to themselves and should have known better," even though most lung cancer patients today grew up in a time when it was perfectly normal (even socially encouraged) to smoke.  My aunt also told me that a sizable percentage of patients with lung cancer (10-20%) never smoked cigarettes.  It's kind of odd anyway that we treat lung cancer patients as "less-than," when (at least for now), the ones who smoked are mostly a victim of the social pressures of the day and outright lies from Big Tobacco.  And then we look at that subset of the lung cancer population who never smoked...

That is the story of a former coworker, Dave Bartley, a never-smoker.  I worked with Dave on an ambulance service in northwestern Vermont, but Dave had also served in the VT Air National Guard for 28 years, and as a firefighter for even longer.  In addition to a lifetime of job hazards from firefighting, he was deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom and was exposed to the infamous "burn pits." In late 2014, Dave had a sudden medical emergency that seemed like a neurological problem, but it turned out he had undiagnosed metastatic lung cancer, which had increased his intracranial pressure.  He died about a month later at age 52.

I love cycling and this sounds like a fun ride in a place I wouldn't normally explore.  If I can take my healthy lungs on a bike ride to help mitigate a stigma, support patients receiving care, and encourage early detection (especially for firefighters), then it sounds like a win all around.