Two years.
I cannot believe it has been an entire year since I last posted. Except - I can believe it. I can believe it because when you are not on an excellent adventure, life takes over. And life, it turns out, is actually a lot harder than something remarkable like riding your bicycle around the country.
That's easy. It's a long vacation doing what you want to do. Life, on the other hand, is all the little things that get in the way of what you'd like to do. So even though I have often thought about our story, and about updating this blog so that it would be complete, I have found it exceedingly difficult to get something posted. There are a lot of reasons for that, and maybe I'll get to them later. In the meantime, here's where we are now.
I could not sleep last night. I woke up about 1, and I was restless and awake until sometime after 4. I finally recognized what was going on. When I realized that the next day was Halloween, I was able to place the day, and my insomnia, in context. If you've ever had a momentous event occur in your life, perhaps you know what I mean when I say, "your body will remember even if you forget." So my body remembered that October 30th is the day we were hit. My body needed me to acknowledge that date. My mind might not have recognized it in conscious thought, but subconsciously it was screaming at me that I had to acknowledge this day.
I lay awake, composing this post in my mind and wishing that was enough to let me fall asleep again. Of course, it doesn't usually work that way! So when the alarm went off a few minutes after 7, I was tired. I've been tired all day. What I did not want to do was lie awake another night, thinking about what I ought to have written. There are many days in the last year and even before that that I have crafted a draft for this blog. But I can't seem to get around to posting it. There's always something else that I need to do. That's that real life thing coming into play. So I'm well behind in my story.
That makes me anxious, of course. Because I am hopeful that I will be able to catch up on my story before we actually finish our trip. And there's the answer to that question. No, we have not yet finished our trip. Not in two years' time. We spent six full months on the road and yet we cannot seem to find one more week to finish the trip.
I've written but not posted several additional entries about what's occurred in the last year. I'm going to do my best to complete those, add the photos that I've been cataloging, and get them posted - but if that doesn't happen at least let me say this much: the pain following the removal of my cast which I last wrote about in my post a year ago persisted and grew more intense. Inside of several weeks I was almost unable to use my right hand. I had to schedule surgery to correct the carpal tunnel injury which I probably sustained many years ago and exacerbated with the break.
Since I had met my deductible for the year, I took the opportunity to check out a couple of other things that had been bothering me. Roger had been saying for some time that he thought I ought to have my sleep checked out, because he felt it was likely that I suffered from sleep apnea. And so I did! As a result, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea.
There were also the occasional issues I had with a very rapid heart rate during exercise. As I was recovering from my wrist fracture, I used the bicycle on the trainer to stay in shape. While we managed to go nearly 10,000 miles with no episodes on our trip, my work on the trainer was causing me to have frequent episodes where my heart rate would spike, I would get a bit dizzy, and would have to stop until the heart rate returned to a more normal rhythm. After wearing a monitor for 24 hours to capture these episodes, the exercise-induced tachycardia I had managed for 10 years was recast as atrial fibrillation. There was a week somewhere around Thanksgiving, I forget the exact time now, that I received news about all three of these issues in very rapid succession. It was, without a doubt, one of the more sobering and discouraging periods of my life. I felt like everything was falling apart.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that a week after Thanksgiving, I had another surgery - this time to correct carpal tunnel issues on my right wrist.
I wasn't overly concerned about the A-fib. In consultation with my cardiologist, we decided to keep an eye on it and assess whether or not the treatment for sleep apnea would mitigate the A-fib (they are highly correlated). But I had an episode in February where we did a very gentle ride and I just kept having episodes of lightheadedness, dizziness, and very rapid, fluttery heart beats. It didn't stop when I got home, so I thought it made sense to get it checked out. That escalated things a bit, and I now take a very low dose of a beta blocker to keep my heart rate from spiking during exertion.
I began a new chapter in the spring, teaching several sections of a course at our University here. It's exciting to me - a challenge and gratifying to have some income. But this new activity disrupted our normal training rides. It became more difficult for Roger and me to get on the tandem.
Still, we made plans to complete our trip once the term was over. Or, as soon as possible after the term was over, considering the fact that we had again agreed to host a bicycle team for the Redlands Classic, and we couldn't leave while all that was going on! And then we decided to go up to Lake Tahoe and watch the team finish one of the races in the Amgen Tour of California. So that pushed things out another week or two. But we really were going to go to Kingman and finish the trip in May. We had even arranged transportation with some of my friends. Except - the weather forecast was for temperatures of 110 degrees in Amboy.
And . . . Roger had some conversations with a friend of ours who teaches at the pharmacy school in Loma Linda, and she did not think it would be wise for me to subject myself to those temperatures while taking a beta blocker. Because, you know - desert - and more importantly, deserted roads . . .
What are you going to do? Once again, my health interrupted our plan. As we had discussed the possibility of completing the trip in May, I was prepared to ride in the heat. I was willing to make a run for it across that long stretch, taking minimal supplies to reduce our weight and increase our speed. I was prepared to ride at night with lights so it would be cooler, resting in the middle of the day at Roy's in Amboy. I had anticipated that we might drop off water bottles along the route on our way to Kingman so we could replenish our supplies. But I was not willing to place Roger in the position of having me potentially collapse because of this issue with my heart and my medication. So when he came home with this news from Vickie, we gave it up. We would not try to do the trip until it got cooler.
And that more or less brings us to now. We've discussed whether or not we could go at Thanksgiving, but I'm teaching this term also and I really don't want to be that constrained when we complete our trip. So it looks like it will be in the Christmas break. I don't think we'll have any problem being too cold, although it will be a different set of issues to address than the heat.
Stay tuned!
