big check

have you ever seen one of those check presentations on tv in which someone receives a 5' long check for some very large some of money? we presented a check for $175k to MD Anderson Cancer Hospital from texas 4000 yesterday. this was the first year the president of the hospital was there to receive the check. the whole event was scheduled very last minute because the president has been flying back and forth between houston and dubai a lot lately as apparently MD Anderson is opening a dubai branch of the hospital. pretty neat!

anyways, we arrived at the hospital had lunch, took lots of pictures with our board of director, dr. mendelson (the president) and the large check and then we went on a tour of the facility. we wrapped up the day with a visit to the children's ward again and had an ice cream social with a bunch of the patients and their families, which was a lot of fun.

i should say we wrapped up the day, or so i thought though because it turned out my day was not quite over. i had always wondered when the actual money exchanged hands when donations were made--if it was actually during all the handshakes and speeches and pictures with the 5' long check. well, after the ice cream social we were walking back to the main lobby and chris, the executive director of texas 4000, handed me two slips of paper saying, i need you to give these to bill, one of the people who organized our visit. i looked down at the two slips of paper in my hand and realized they were checks. both were written out to MD Anderson. the first was for $125k and earmarked for an endowed professorship and the other was for $50k and earmarked for research of cancer in adolescents. so in the end, it wasn't the bigwigs that gave the hospital the money. it was me.

i'm not sure why chris gave me the checks. he could have just handed them to bill himself...but i was glad he didn't. when i returned to austin at the end of the summer, i couldn't think about the ride without crying, so at some point, i just told myself to stop thinking about it. yesterday was the first time i had spent any amount of time talking to the people with whom i rode all summer (ie people from the route i was on) for more than just a few minutes...at this point it has been almost 5 months, and honestly, i almost backed out at the last minute for fear that i would just become the shadow of myself that i was when i first arrived back in austin by seeing everyone. that's terrible, isn't it? the extremes to which one will go to protect themselves?

marissa, one of the patients i was talking to, was 16 years old and had been battling osteosarcomma for the last three years. her mom told me that she was going to have her leg amputated because the various treatments she'd received had killed all the tissue in her lower leg. marissa was actually excited about it as she reasoned that then she could get on with her life and start walking again. having worked with some very gung-ho amputees, i suspect marissa will be one of those who is up and walking in no time. her story puts my experience with riding into perspective. i had needed to be reminded that my own discomfort was relatively silly in the bigger picture of what the we were doing.

when i handed bill the checks it was almost as if everything had been forgotten. this was why we (i) had done the ride--to enable cancer research and researchers to move forward. now that the money has been given, it (they) can...and now we start again...moving back to the daily basics of figuring out what people are wearing on the ride this summer, who is borrowing which jersey for the 2009 kickoff and how we can get that one slow rider in better shape and ready for june.