Introducing 'Insane ripping woman' aka LT

So, now it is my turn. It's Lauren, Tim normally refers to me as LT.

I'm not all that good at doing journal entries but decided to bash at the keys during my cancer journey every so often. Tim and I have decided to include some of my entries to add my perspective and further entertain you all. Contrary to what most people think, my closest friends know I am not as mental as the following entry will portray!! This journal entry was written the night before my first radiation treatment.

3 January 2010:
So, perfect, the night I promised myself that I’d start writing this journal (the night before my first radiation treatment), my head and body decided to give me some material for the journal – and the need to calm the f**k down. (Please excuse the language, we found that blasphemy is a symptom of treatment; prior, during and post). I was feeling angry, and anxious. I ran a bath after dinner and put a face mask on after undressing quickly. I felt like my clothes were bugging me or something. I just knew they had to come off, and fast. After laying in the bath for 3 minutes or so, I started feeling worse. I was angry, scared, anxious, and well, emotional.
That’s when I started to think ‘here’s the mental breakdown’. After trying to relax, my emotions just got more and more raw. The tears started to flow, along with a great sense of helplessness and loneliness. I didn’t know what to do, or think, but I kept saying ‘it’s going to be OK’. After crying into the face washer for awhile I was thinking of places to go, people who I could see, to help calm me down. That was when I heard the cat in the hallway, chewing on and ripping off and spitting out chunks of cardboard from the box out there. GENIUS!

(Example of Cous Cous ripping something up)

I decided then and there, that I would try the cat’s technique of de-stressing. I quickly unplugged, dried, dressed and found myself some scissors. It felt good.

I quite angrily (but positively) cut along where Cous Cous had started, and ditched the scissors to rip off with my own hands. I know that I’m not totally insane because I was keeping a mindful ear out for the pending arrival home of our house mate Sarah. I didn’t want her to walk in on INSANE RIPPING WOMAN!

(I am happy to say that I calmed down after that night's efforts. Stay tuned for further entries from me about our rollercoaster journey of 2010, thank you for reading and much love - Lauren).

Map me!

Some of you have asked why I haven't included a map for each day's ride. It's mostly because the blog template I use constrains the size of images, which tends to throw a nicely-composed Google Map into total disarray.

To get around this, I've put a 'today's map' link at the top of every post where I've covered some ground. You should now be able to open the map in a new tab or window and zoom around it to your heart's content. Let me know if you run into any problems or I've stuffed something up!

Lauren's Cancer Journey (pt 1, or What the hell are you doing, Tim? pt 3)

I've realised that getting my teeth into the subject of why I'm riding is going to take quite a few posts, over a fair bit of time. Much of this deals with LT's journey through cancer treatment, so I'm dropping the "What the hell are you doing?" title for a while and focusing on her story.

Lauren's diagnosis immediately quashed my plans to pack everything up and go back to QLD. Even though we'd decided against moving in with each other not long before, I knew in my heart that I had to be with her during treatment. It was an easy decision to make. We also shelved our plans to travel in Thailand together after Christmas (which reminds me hon, we still haven't made our insurance claims...). My stomach mourned the loss of its ticket to cheap, delicious street food and cocktails that come in buckets (handy if purging previous cocktails is required).

A cancer diagnosis means one thing in the short term: a bucketload of medical appointments for scans, tests, checkups and any other excuses to be poked and prodded by doctors. This all happens while you swill around in medical limbo, wondering, "How bad is it?", "What are LT's chances?" and "Will she ever have a normal life again?"

It's a scary place. While we were going through it, I wrote this in my journal:

2259, Sun 29 Nov 2009

Sitting up in bed while Lauren enjoys a late night snack of biscuits and cheese, a copy of Twilight and a pick at her neck wound. She seems a bit edgy at the moment, which could be down to the fact she'll be radioactive for at least 6 hours tomorrow. That's right kids: I'm going to have a girlfriend with a Geiger reading (fingers crossed for supernatural powers, preferably in the fields of engine tuning or intercourse).

It's called a PET (Positron Emission Tomography, I think, without the assistance of Wikipedia) and it means they get to inject her with extremely expensive radioactive sugar, before putting her in a machine that will spew fundamental particles at her in an effort to take delightful snapshots of her interior. Given the freakish and amazing array of bits of muscle, fluid and bone that were photographed during her MRI, I can hardly imagine what new perspectives this procedure might offer. Then again, my medical qualifications extend to buying throat lozenges and knowing when I have piles.

I've got a date with a bloke selling a 1983 GSX250 tomorrow. I'm considering the tactic of carrying a large amount of cash on me a seeing how low I can get his price on the promise of taking it away then and there. I'll let you know how that goes, but first I need to see whether or not it's a complete piece of shite. It is, after all, only a year younger than me, and I haven't aged well.

1930, Mon 30 Nov 2009

Well, Lauren is currently reading a Coles magazine, scanning recipes and subtle marketing mechanisms, quietly irradiating the loungeroom. Apparently the scan went pretty well compared to the MRI; no loud noises this time, though they had the usual trouble finding a vein to pump the plutonium into her.

I checked out the GSX 250 today and was half impressed and half disappointed. I think it fits its price point pretty well, but I'm not sure if I can be bothered doing the work to fix the broken stuff, like most of the instrument cluster. I sounded fantastic and was just the right size, but I'm not going to jump on it unless I'm more disappointed by the next couple I look at. I have a date with a black 2008 CBR125R tomorrow and I'm quite excited about that :-). It's a little jigger I've looked at a lot over the last couple of years and if I have the chance to get a nearly new one without taking the first depreciation hit, I'll be well pleased. Of course, I'll be subscribing to another couple of years of riding a 'poofter bike', but I frankly couldn't give a damn.

LT has another appointment tomorrow. It's with the plastic surgeon, who will hopefully give us some kind of roadmap for treatment. If he doesn't, I hope the next appointment, the following day, will. It's a bit of a roundabout of treatment and sleeping in at the moment, mixed with wide awake moments at 4am and lustful interludes dreaming of riding again.

LT's in good spirits today, which is good to see. I'm grumpy and sore, still fighting a cold, but hey, at least I'm not working.

An Intents Night

Something I didn't mention in the last post are the sleeping conditions I was privileged to experience at the Jenolan caravan park in Oberon. Don't get me wrong, the place was beautifully set up, but certain facts of tent life didn't really occur to me when I booked in that afternoon.

You see, Oberon is about 1100m above sea level, just shy of the height our beloved Mt Wellington back in Hobart. The daily weather rules are very different from those on the coast.  Inland, deprived of the moderating blanket of moist sea air, it gets breathtakingly cold the minute the sun wanders off to irradiate India and the Middle East. Cooking dinner and writing in the open-air camp kitchen, my hands gradually slowed until I was creaking with every stiff-fingered keystroke. By about eight, after calling my workmate Tim in Newcastle, I had lost all sensation in my nose, ears and genitals, so I thawed myself with a shower and crawled into the tent.

Kept awake by the noise of the quarry nearby (thanks, council zoning laws!), I lay there uncomfortably as the mercury dropped like a stone. By midnight, I was wearing two pairs of long johns, jeans, a singlet, t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, two woolen jumpers, two pairs of woolen socks and a fleece beanie. The only thing sticking out of my sleeping bag cocoon was my nose.  Eventually I slept, but somehow stayed aware of the cold even in my dreams.

Note to self for the next inland journey: get down to the Salvos to buy a blanket and a teaspoon of cement. I need to harden up before I tackle my next freezing night in Chateau Canvas.

Through the Valley of the Kangaroos

Today's map.

I was gently roused from my tent-bound slumber by a pack of jogging Sydneysiders complaining about the price of daycare. For a terrifying minute, I thought the trip must all be a dream; that I'd simply fallen asleep near a coffee shop in Sandy Bay, but I soon came to my senses. Nobody in Sandy Bay puts their offspring in childcare. It's far more cost effective to enrol them in sailing lessons, then leave them stranded in the river Derwent for about 18 years. If the child manages to survive, they're dragged up the beach, given a haircut, a Porsche and welcomed back into civilised society as a functioning adult.

As my morning brain-fog cleared, I remembered the advice of the family I met the night before. The road northwest through Kangaroo Valley was excellent, they said, so I broke out the map and plotted a route through it, aiming to finish somewhere west of the Blue Mountains. I went through my ritual of forcing down 3 Vita Brits with warm UHT milk, drying out the tent and solving the daily jigsaw of loading the bike. Then I hightailed it out of there via Nowra, hoping not to run into a holidaying Sydneysider and be scalded by soya latte froth.

The smooth, narrow road ricocheted up a densely forested ridge, then sharply down into the long, green valley itself. The NSW police appear to have made this road one of their favourite bitumen casinos, stacking the odds against the motorist with stupidly low speed limits and lurking patrol cars. For all my indignation, I obeyed the nanny signs. I simpy couldn't afford to risk my license when I had so much country left to cover.

Puttering along the floor of the valley, past the Kangaroo township, hunger pangs started to set in. To my delight, the signpost to Fitzroy Falls had one of those knife and fork symbols on it, so I turned off and went in search of cutlery. The carpark told stories of busloads of international visitors and the visitor centre was enormous. The whole operation also had the most elaborate complex of composting toilets I'd ever seen, complete with a warning not to dispose of children in the waste tanks. I suppose it must be a right bugger to fish them out, let alone put them in the car afterwards.

It was only 11am, so I decided to go for a walk to see the Falls and further sharpen my appetite. I'd hardly gone a hundred metres before I spotted a pair of lyrebirds fossicking in the undergrowth. I knelt down by the side of the walkway to watch, which immediately drew a crowd of tourists - not to see if I'd had a mild stroke, but to feverishly capture a thousand photos of the little beasties. I'm all for using the camera as a means to capture the moment, but the horde was clicking and flashing so enthusiastically that they may have given Fitzroy Falls its first mated pair of epileptic lyrebirds. What are the rangers going to do when they see one having a seizure? Put them in the recovery position? They don't get taught that stuff at ranger school.

Anyway, the Falls were actually really impressive. With the odd, forested escarpments of the area, it's easy to imagine a hapless early explorer simply falling off the edge of one of these outcrops. There's dense bush all around you, then suddenly the ground is 400ft lower than it used to be.

After a solid walk around the edge of the cliffs - and impressing a Chinese gentlemen with my 'cooee' skills to the point where he slapped me on the back of the head in excitement - I hit up the visitor centre for an early lunch. It was a refreshing change from other heavily-touristed places. The staff were friendly and chatty, made a good coffee and what is possibly the world's best lentil burger.

After eating so well, I felt like sitting in the sun and not moving for a while, so I did. I grabbed my laptop from the bike and blogged away, gloriously relaxed, for an hour or so.

On the road again, I tacked north, then west along the railway line to Goulburn, passing through Bundanoon and Wingello. At Goulburn, I had a tricky decision to make. The route to Oberon, my initial goal for the day, was 150km with some dirt sections on my outdated map. Dirt isn't much of a problem, but it slows you down and I'd burnt a lot of time chilling out at Fitzroy Falls. With the sun already dipping at 3pm, I struck out for Taralga, 50km away, to ask if the rest of the road would be suitable for my roadbike rig.

As it turned out, I didn't need to worry. Although it was bumpy and twisty, the whole route had been sealed recently, the bloke at the Taralga petrol station (one pump) told me. With a full tank and renewed confidence, I pushed on through the increasingly elevated and cold patchwork of national parks and farmland. Stopping at Abercrombie River for a wee, it felt like the middle of nowhere.

Another hour later, stiff and grumpy, I arrived in the pretty town of Oberon. The local caravan park was neat and cheap, so I happily pitched the tent on a deserted area of grass and settled into my evening routine.