· Date: Thursday July 11, 2019
· Where: Sioux City, Iowa to Fort Dodge, Iowa
· Total Distance Covered: 135 miles
· Running Partner: Brenna
Before going to bed last night, I had taken NyQuil in the hopes that I would have a productive sleep. Because of the run with the Briar Cliff Cross Country coach, I had cut the time I was planning to sleep from ten hours down to six. This wasn’t ideal especially considering how sick I was feeling last night after the run. Even with NyQuil, I had trouble sleeping consistently and often woke up because of my coughing. Two times I had trouble falling back to sleep because of the partying football players next door. When I woke up, I immediately took a DayQuil and started to feel a little better. Throughout the day, I would stay on top of the dosing and as soon as it was time for the next dose, I would take it. As the day continued, this helped me to feel better. But after running the entirety of my eleven miles with Brenna, the activities of the day caught up with me and I quickly became overwhelmingly exhausted.
Running with Brenna today was fun. She was one of our three Team Directors, which meant she was one of the few in constant contact with someone from the Ulman Foundation. She relayed our whereabouts back to the foundation and updated them on how we were fairing. She, Erin, and Caroline, who were the other two directors, also made the executive decisions for the team and relayed any new information from Ulman to the rest of Team Boston. Brenna is one of those people who can talk to anyone about anything and the conversation was great.
I also appreciated that Brenna was so accommodating to my abilities today. Ordinarily, she usually runs a bit faster than I do and is very athletic. Since I hadn’t run with her, I was looking forward to when we would because I knew she was better than I was, so it would be a great workout. Today on our runs, we ran past more open fields and farmhouses with large windmills and wind turbines. It was a farm country over here in Iowa. This also meant that the smells were not pleasant, and the flies were moving in swarms. Trucks passed us piled high with manure that stunk up the road for a brief time after it passed us. As we ran by the fields, we could smell all the fresh manure the farmers had just put down on their crops. I thought the smells were nauseating. Even through my nose was unbelievably stuffy, I could smell them. Even when the smells from the farms weren’t around, taking a deep breath while I ran was still a struggle. I was unable to control my breathing and it hurt to fill my lungs and take a deep breath. My nostrils were inflamed and plugged with mucous. My throat was on fire. My voice was all scratchy and even while running, I experienced fits of coughing. We ended up running at a crawl. I asked to stop and walk a few times and we even took a couple of minutes rest during our last set of three miles.
I was beaten.
This cold was knocking me out and I was beginning to wonder if I should see a doctor.
“How does one go about doing that as they are running across the country?” I remember asking myself. I wished I had my stethoscope to listen to my lungs, or to take my vital signs. I wondered where I could get a prescription if I needed one, and I wondered if the doctor would allow me to run. It didn’t matter though. I would run. If someone told me to take the day off, I wouldn’t do it. Sure, taking the day off today may have helped improve my condition, but those battling cancer never had days off. If I could beat cancer, I could do this. I knew I could do this.
A few days later, Brenna would tell me that she would have told anyone else they weren’t allowed to run in the condition I was in. But she knew I would have told her no and ran anyway. She knew it would have broken my heart to not run and she knew that if I had the will to run, I would continue to.
I was lucky today since we still had two smaller vehicles to replace one of our fifteen-passenger vans. I had been placed in the small minivan and we had rotated through our runners much faster than the fifteen-passenger van which had to run twice the distance. I liked how our team was so close that you could have any combination of people in the smaller vans and still have a good day. But I still enjoyed the atmosphere of the larger van much better. Today, I was relieved to be done so early even if I had been missing the atmosphere of the larger van. We had arrived at the host by about two in the afternoon and I wanted to go to sleep so badly. Tonight, we had a community dinner and service event and I wanted to try to rest so that I could attend.
As we arrived at our host site, we thought we had the wrong place. First, the address brought us to a hairdressing salon. Secondly, the smell in the parking lot was horrendous. It was more nauseating and traumatic to our nostrils than anything we had smelled all day. Across the street, was the Purina Dog Food Factory which was to blame for the smell. I promised myself to never feed any dog I knew, Purina dog food. If the process to create the food could create a stench that hung in the air of an entire section of Fort Dodge, I didn’t think that any creature should eat it.
As it turns out, the address was correct. Our host for tonight was the La’ James International College which specialized in professional health and beauty. The fact that their main address directed people to their hair salon was correct. As the seven of us who had ridden in the minivan today waited in their lobby, it was the most obscure lobby for any school I had ever encountered. In fact, it looked exactly like a hair salon and nothing like an educational institute. As we looked around at the brightly packaged beauty products displayed in neat rows on shelves throughout the room, we wondered where we would be sleeping. Eventually, we were directed to suite-style apartments where students lived when they took classes. Since it was the summer, these apartments were empty now. The team had about five apartments and I quickly found a spot in one of them. I didn’t want to sleep on the bed since the sheets till seemed to be dirty and it grossed me out. In fact, I don’t think any of the guys on the team who would share this apartment with me slept on their beds. So, I blew up my sleeping pad and threw it on the floor. I took a NyQuil, closed the blinds to the room, and went to sleep.
A few hours later, Evan woke me up and said it was time to go to dinner. As I walked out into the living room, I saw John-Hanson sprawled out on the couch. He looked exhausted and after talking to him, we realized we were both feeling the same symptoms. The team had started calling what John-Hanson and I had, “the sickness,” and we sure had it. We agreed that because this community dinner was at the Unity Point Health Trinity Cancer Center, and this was the Oncology Center of Iowa, we were apprehensive to attend. We didn’t want to get anyone sick especially since we would likely be around those with suppressed immune systems.
We decided to take the host van with us to the hospital so that John-Hanson and I could ask those putting on the community dinner if it was appropriate for us to attend. If not, we could drive the van back to our apartment for the night and go back to bed. When we got there, the administration at the hospital insisted on us joining the dinner. We found this strange and not to protocol, but it would have been extremely rude to leave. As they brought us to a massive conference room that could easily have held one hundred and fifty people, John-Hanson and I realized why. The team wouldn’t be seeing any cancer patients until after dinner. John-Hanson and I would leave after dinner and avoid visiting the cancer patients who were at the hospital.
We respectfully let everyone make their plates before us and then sat alone in a corner so as not to get anyone else sick. We were disappointed we couldn’t join in the festivities as there was a lot of administration from the hospital present as well as a reporter. But as we drove back to the apartment, we agreed that this was a decision for the better. We both were feeling worse than when we woke up for dinner and were glad to have been leaving such an environment. We realized that we probably should not have even attended and simply found dinner elsewhere. We both felt guilty. There were plenty of others on the team though who had colds and had ignored John-Hanson’s and my concern for visiting patients. We only hoped that nothing was spread to these people who were already dealt with enough during their hospital stay. When we arrived back at our apartment, we both immediately went back to sleep.
Hopefully, it would be a better day tomorrow. I felt so sad to have missed an event like we did tonight, but I knew that if someone, who was as sick as I was, decided to visit me during my cancer treatments, I would have been upset. I hoped that the next time, I would be able to take part.
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