 |
Photo by Rich
Schmitt
Milana Dolezal, her mascot Blimpie and tour leader Lance
Armstrong |
a cross-country odyssey
She offers hope on wheels
BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
Like many others, Milana Dolezal has felt to the core the emotional
devastation cancer can cause.
“I know how it is to run out of morphine in the middle of
the night and to hold somebody’s hand through that pain,”
said the Jonsson Cancer Center researcher, who stayed with her grandmother
as she lay dying of metastatic breast cancer.
Now a fellow in the hematology/oncology program, Dolezal, a triathlete,
recently found an unusual way to deliver a message of hope to patients
and enlighten the public about the importance of participating in
clinical trials.
Chosen from about 1,000 applicants, she pedaled for a week with
25 others from the cancer community — physicians, caregivers
and survivors alike — in the Tour of Hope, a bike relay that
spanned 3,200 miles from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.
Along the way, she met cancer survivors and schoolchildren who
followed their progress via a Web site and gathered to greet them.
“We saw one woman standing on the side of the road in a small
town in New Mexico,” Dolezal recalled. “She had just
been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and came out to see us just because
she wanted some hope.”
Dolezal was a member of one of four relay teams that started out
on Oct. 11, led by five-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong,
whose inspirational battle against testicular cancer has made him
an icon.
Traveling in buses equipped with bunk beds, her team had to bicycle
every fourth stage during the 53-stage trip, advancing 57 to 65
miles at a time. That meant, for example, crossing the punishing
hills of New Mexico at midnight.
Throughout their odyssey, Armstrong, who had other commitments,
joined them whenever he could, lifting their spirits. “When
he got on his bike, we were all in our element; every one of us
was in the place we wanted to be,” Dolezal said. “He
really is a champion for the cancer cause.”
One highlight came when she left the team to fly to Bethesda, Md.,
for a scheduled presentation at the National Institutes of Health,
where Dolezal worked as a research assistant while she attended
the University of Maryland.
After graduating, she went on to Stanford to work as a research
associate, earned an M.D. and an M.S. in molecular biology at Thomas
Jefferson University in Philadelphia and did her residency in internal
medicine at USC before coming to UCLA.
But going back to Bethesda to appear with Armstrong to talk about
what inspired her fight against cancer “was an emotional moment,”
especially with her mother and brother in the audience.
Dolezal is especially elated that 33,000 have so far signed the
Cancer Promise, to which she and her fellow cyclists urged people
to commit to.
“Not all of us can be on the front lines of this battle
as researchers and doctors, but we all can make a difference by
signing this pledge,” she said.
See it at www.tourofhope.org/promise. |
