Five weeks before Griffyn Dmytar was born, an ultrasound showed a mysterious shadow. By the time he was diagnosed with cancer at nine days of age, the shadow had grown into a baseball-sized tumour.
Surgery came four days later, Griffyn’s anxious parents, both Comox Valley RCMP officers, travelling with him to Vancouver. Older sister Jordyn spent Christmas on the Island with another Mountie family.
They hoped that was the end of it, but that March the neuroblastoma returned — a tumour on Griffyn’s left adrenal gland, plus six spots on his liver. That led to five months at B.C. Children’s Hospital, four rounds of chemotherapy poisoning that tiny little body. Imagine your child enduring that. Imagine being the parents.
Griffyn, now just shy of three years old, has been cancer-free ever since. And his mother, Misty Dmytar, is riding the Tour de Rock, which raises money to fight childhood cancer.
That’s a compelling story, she is told.
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“I didn’t ask for it,” she replies.
No. Nobody does. Not the cancer part, anyway.
Nobody expects to be cast in this movie. Childhood cancer strikes out of the blue, at random, an equal-opportunity destroyer: rich, poor, immigrants, natives, dysfunctional families and ones plucked straight from a Norman Rockwell painting. No point in looking for logic; the cancer gods are capricious, throw their darts blind.
“People ask, ‘How can a brand-new baby have cancer,’ but there’s no answer,” Misty says. “Cancer’s a crapshoot. You don’t know who’s going to survive and who’s going to pass away.”
Griffyn goes through regular checkups, not just for cancer but for side effects of the chemotherapy drugs, which can cause hearing, sight, heart, urinary tract and other problems. So far, so good, but if issues do arise, so be it. “I would rather have a son with two hearing aids because of the chemicals than not have him in my life,” says his mother, now a member of the Nanaimo RCMP.
B.C. Children’s Hospital says 120 to 150 children are diagnosed with cancer in this province each year. That’s 20 to 25 on Vancouver Island.
Most will live. Others will not. The 21 cyclists on this year’s Tour de Rock team are riding the length of Vancouver Island, more than 1,000 kilometres in total, with the photos of two little Victoria girls attached to their bike frames. Molly Campbell and Madrona Fuentes — Baby Molly and Baby Madrona — were both two years old when they succumbed to leukemia this summer.
The riders have been pedalling every day since Sept. 22, when they set out from Port Alice. It has been a tough go, storm after storm (like riding into a firehose, tweeted the Victoria Police Department’s Mike Russell). The cops grunted their way over the Malahat and out to Sooke on Wednesday, will pinball around Greater Victoria for a couple of days, mostly visiting schools, before squeezing the brakes one last time at Centennial Square just before 5 p.m. Friday.
The journey takes a physical toll. The West Shore RCMP’s Donna Fraser, who welcomed a new grandson just days before the tour began, has been riding with two cracked ribs suffered during a crash on the drenching 145-kilometre haul from Port McNeill to Sayward on Sept. 23. Another fall, this one on the roller-coaster between Port Alberni and Ucluelet on Saturday, cost her a bike helmet. She’s still riding, in pain. It’s not cancer, she says.
Then there’s the other, less-tangible piece of the equation. “We have been training from March to September for the physical part of it, but there is no preparation for the emotional part,” Misty says.
The raw humanity the riders encounter, the humbling expressions of support, the intensity of the overall experience — it triggers something inside.
“I haven’t cried since Griffyn’s diagnosis, and the emotions that have built up since then came out on the tour,” Misty says.
When the team rode out of Ucluelet on Sunday, she spotted a full rainbow, the first she has seen since Griffyn’s first day of chemotherapy.
This is the 15th anniversary of the Cops for Cancer Tour de Rock, which has raised almost $18 million for the Canadian Cancer Society since 1998. For more information, go to tourderock.ca.
