Tour de Rock

Wednesday was a tough, but inspiring, day for the riders.
Tough in that the combination of the Malahat and the climb to Sooke strains the legs, particularly when the rain falls. Inspiring in that this day was all about the unbridled enthusiasm of youth. Among the highlights:
• The hair fell and the spirits soared at Shawnigan Lake School, where the students raised an impressive $23,000
• The atmosphere was absolutely electric at Ecole Poirier Elementary, where nearly 1,300 students from across Sooke cheered the riders in. Molly Irwin, the eight-year-old big sister of junior rider Daisy Irwin, raised $1,900 shaving her head.
• Two Tour de Rock riders, Mary Brigham and Stephanie McFarlane, shaved their heads for the cause, too — Stephanie losing her long reddish-blonde locks at Langford’s Veterans Memorial Park while her son sat in her lap.
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Want to know why they do this? Consider the story of one of the Tour’s junior riders:
One day, when four-year-old Amory Hall was so sick, so weak from the chemotherapy that his mother Rochana had to hold his head over the toilet, the little boy turned to her: “Mom, I don’t feel I’m going to live very long.”
But because of the advances in cancer treatment, funded by efforts like the Cops For Cancer Tour de Rock, Rochana was able to look her cancer-stricken son in the eye.
“Sweetie, I know it feels like that,” she told him. “But I know that one day I’ll be at your high school grad, and I’ll be at your wedding.”
Amory is 14 now, in Grade 9 at Victoria’s Mount Doug secondary school. It’s a long way from where he was 10 years ago, after being diagnosed with lymphoblastic leukemia.
“You feel like you’re living in another world,” says Rochana. A single mother, she would spend the night in hospital with Amory before getting up and heading off to her job as a government child-protection worker.

Amory had chemotherapy every day for four years. Sometimes he was well enough to be cared for at home, sometimes not. There were blood transfusions, bronchitis, whooping cough, pneumonia. Some days there were lumbar punctures, treatments so painful that they drugged the little boy so that he wouldn’t remember them. Rochana wished she could take on that pain herself. “God, why can’t I be the one who’s sick,” she prayed.
Amory saw she was in enough pain as it was. Once, as the sickness consumed him, he said “Please, can we go to the hospital so the nurses can look after me and you can get some sleep?”
Even when he was well enough to go to school, he was teased because of his lack of hair, the puffiness left by chemotherapy drugs. Thank God for the Tour de Rock. “It was a little, tiny way of making him feel special,” says his mother. “He was always treated with so much dignity and love by the riders, and that would compensate for what else he was going through.”
Even though he was stuck in isolation when in hospital, his Tour friends ensured he was never really alone. “Any rider he ever had in those four years would come hang out with him in hospital, play video games.”
Last Christmas, Amory celebrated five years of remission, a big landmark for those who have fought cancer. His mother likes what she sees in the young man who has emerged from his ordeal.

“He was shown so much love, care and compassion that it makes him that way himself.”

Learn more about this year’s tour at Copsforcancer.ca or tourderock.ca. The riders would appreciate any messages of support you may care to add to the blog on the latter site.

COMING UP ON DAY 13

A busy penultimate day for the riders. Among their stops are Fairfield Plaza just after 9, Oak Bay High at 10 and the Sidney Gazebo at the end of Beacon Avenue between 2:30 and 3:30.