Nothing was going to keep Wendy Burns off her bicycle.
Not stage-four melanoma diagnosed eight years ago. Not a crushed pelvis, shattered knee and broken foot from an alleged drunken driver hitting her car four years ago. Not even the effects of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation to treat breast cancer, diagnosed in August.
And ride she will.
Burns, 47, of Deerfield was among 24 cyclists selected to participate in the Lance Armstrong Tour of Hope that will take them from San Diego to Washington beginning Sept. 29. The cyclists, who will ride 100 miles a day, are cancer survivors, caretakers of patients or work with cancer patients.
Burns, a travel agent, said the accident recovery was difficult and often depressing, but the cancer treatment was different.
“I didn’t know for sure if I would come out of it,” she said.
She was undergoing chemotherapy when she saw Armstrong talking about the tour on TV and told her husband that she would be on the team.
“That was my goal,” she said. “The riding would clear my head. I would feel depressed if I didn’t get out on my bike. After the first two rounds of chemo, it just made me feel better. I felt the harder I rode, the more poison would leave my body.”
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D.J. Burns, who married Wendy three weeks before the August 2001 accident, said his wife redefines the word focused. “She is one stubborn woman,” he said.
They were driving to their summer home in Michigan when Wendy dropped off D.J. nine miles from the house so he could ride his bike the rest of the way. A man in a pickup truck hit Wendy’s car and she was in a wheelchair for three months.
“When the doctors said she would never race again, she told them `You don’t know me; you have no idea who I am. I will race again,'” he said. By December, she was riding.