Peter Mazereeuw
Age: 23
Diagnosis: Acute Lymphoblastic Lukemia
Age at Diagnosis: 18
Hometown: Newmarket, ON
Biography :
My story starts when I was 18, in August of 2006. It was the summer after I graduated from high school, and I was in the midst of planning a deep-woods camping expedition with some old friends.
The date of departure was approaching quickly, and I had a nagging fever that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t enough to slow me down, but my mother convinced me to check in with a doctor before I launched into the wilderness and out of cell-phone range.
The doctor ran some blood-work, hummed and haw’d and told me to come back again in a few days. The second time around they ran my blood again, and that was when it all began; the doctor told me I needed to go the ER as soon as possible, because my white blood cell count was in the basement and I had virtually no immune system.
A visit to the ER led to a week in hospital, and finally a diagnosis: acute lymphocytic leukemia. I was sent down to Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, where I began a month of intensive, in-patient chemotherapy. A week of radiation treatments, six months of intense out-patient chemo, and finally a year and a half of “maintenance” chemo followed. I finished my treatment in late 2008.
I endured my share of complications and tough spots during treatment, as all cancer patients do. Recurring attacks of pancreatitis forced me to stay on an IV diet for a couple of months, and a seizure meant I spent a short time drugged out of my mind on medications. But the most difficult part of my treatment was probably having to watch all of my peers move on with their lives, enter University, and do all of the things that I should have been doing. Sympathy was easy to find, but real understanding was not.
Near the end of my treatment I was put in touch with a wonderful group that is now known as Young Adult Cancer Canada (YACC). I attended a retreat for young adult cancer survivors outside of Montreal, and found a lot of the support I had been missing from other young men and women who were going through the same thing that I was. The retreat led to another conference, and that’s where I met Mikey and Bonnie Lang. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were going to play a big part of my, as YACC people would say, “reintrajectorization”.
Mikey and Bonnie pitched an idea to everyone at that survivors’ conference in Lake Louise. They wanted to take a small group of us into the deserts of Oregan, strap us to some inflatable kayaks, and shoot us down white-water rapids for a week. No big deal. It would all be on film of course, and the Langs hoped the footage could be turned into an inspirational documentary showing how conquering cancer can prepare you to conquer anything, including class-five rapids.
Most of the group decided this wasn’t for them. We were all weakened from our illness in one way or another, and no one had any white-water kayaking experience. I almost dismissed the idea, but there was a little voice in my head that told me to go for it…I had decided to go to the YACC retreat on a whim, and it had turned out to be a life-altering experience. Maybe going out of my comfort zone again would pay off.
The angel (or maybe devil) on my shoulder wasn’t the only reason I signed up. The Langs made for a great sales team…the seemingly perfect young couple, brimming with enthusiasm, confidence and energy. To this day I have never met any one, never mind two people as positive as Mikey and Bonnie, and I doubt I ever will. So I told them I’d think about it, and before I knew it I was flying back out West to start our journey.
I didn’t know what to expect when I got there. I only knew a few of my fellow adventurers from Lake Louise, and had never been in the desert or gone down a rapid. I did know it was going to be fun, and I figured being a part of a documentary was just icing on the cake.
We all met in the Calgary home of Mikey’s parents, who were as gracious as two hosts ever could be. We bonded right away, and the car-ride down was probably as much fun as the expedition itself. The rest, as they say, is history, and you can see it for yourself on film.
The trip impacted me in a big way. I don’t know who I would have been had I not participated…but going through the physical and emotional whirlwind of making “Wrong way to hope” let me put things in perspective, and distance myself from my illness. Most of all, it showed me that I wasn’t weak and sickly, that I COULD overcome obstacles of all kinds. It gave me the confidence to take risks, and the knowledge that I really was on the other side of my fight with cancer.
I can’t pick one single, favourite memory of the trip, so I will pick two moments that I got to enjoy throughout the trip: the feeling of sitting at the top of a rapid, looking down at the crashing water and rocks, and feeling nothing but confidence…and sitting in my sleeping bag at night, looking up at more stars then I’ve ever seen before in my life.
