Today was a beautiful day. We biked from Wickenburg Arizona to Phoenix passing through magnificent desert in full bloom brought on by the rain that preceded us. America the beautiful at her best.
I was filled with gratitude for being alive, for living in this great country of ours, for being healthy enough to bike and enjoy nature at its best. Coterminously with feeling such gratitude I felt sadness prompted by hearing the stories of several people we met in the course of our day. At breakfast we met Kim, who was extremely moved by our mission to spread lung cancer awareness as she shared that her mother, a non smoker, had died in her 50’s of lung cancer and her best friend was recently diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. A few hours later we met Matt selling healing stones along our route. He too was brought to tears by our mission as he recounted losing his partner to lung cancer at age 52. We biked the last 25 miles of the day with members of the Phoenix Bike Coalition and heard about Kevin’s two sister in laws who both have lung cancer.
The stories were at once sad but also reaffirming that we are in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.
Lung cancer is the single biggest cancer killer of men and women in the United States and we need to do something about that. Please help me share the message that we need more access to lung cancer screenings and more research into treatments that can make this disease a chronic illness rather than the nation’s biggest cancer killer. While I fully understand that everyone is currently concerned, and should be, about coronovirus—and we should do everything possible to curb its spread—it’s equally sobering to think that in the United States alone a person dies every 3.5 minutes from lung cancer.
– Isabella