The Achilles Track Club
It began in 1977 with one deranged cell. That cell divided, creating progeny, and those progeny spawned more progeny. The divisions continued until an entire colony of cells was creeping through the back of the eyeballs.
Eyes are about the size of golf balls. If you could peer straight into them, you would see something like a thick shag carpet draped across their back walls. This carpet is called the retina, and its tiny fiber projections are cells shaped like rods and cones. These cells have exquisite sensitivity to light: the rods detect light and dark, and the cones sense color. Light waves bounce off objects in the environment, pass into the eyes through the pupil, and get flipped upside down and projected onto the retina. Whenever the eyelids are open, there is an upside-down movie of the world playing in the back of the eyes. Rods and cones convert this movie into an electrical signal and send it to the brain for processing.
The deranged cells multiplied like cockroaches, hogging room and looting resources a bit vague from the rods and cones. These ball-shaped intruders had no special function other than eating, growing and crowding space. They interrupted the movie playing on the retina, and eventually there were so many of them that the movie went black.
29-year-old Ivonne Mosquera approached the starting line of the 2007 Boston Marathon. Her thick black hair was woven in a French braid, the way she used to wear it for ballet, tap and jazz class.
Over 20,000 runners were competing on that windy day in April. Ivonne stood with four running friends, including 28-year-old Mike Oliva, her training partner. Ivonne and Mike had been running the loops of Central Park for months in preparation for this morning.
“You could feel the anxiety and nervous energy around you … people were shaking at the start line,” Mike says. “But we are the most laid-back runners. We just go out there and get it done,” he says. “Ivonne may have been nervous the night before, but she was loose by that time.”
When the race began, all those anxious runners flew by them.
Looking in through the window of the pupils, the doctors saw a creamy colored tumor staring back at them. The cancer had spread through both eyes, blindfolding the 13-month old baby and threatening to reach its talons into her brain.
The baby was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer that typically hits children before age five.
“In the world at the present time, 50 percent of children die” from retinoblastoma, says David Abramson, chief of ophthalmic oncology at New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The odds are much better in Western countries where medical care is good. In the United States, where some 300 cases arise annually, 95 percent of children survive. But usually one or both eyes must be removed, he says.
“Boston starts with a downhill, and then the hills kick in at the middle of the race,” Ivonne says. Most of those nervous runners who darted ahead of us at the beginning got tired during the uphills, and Ivonne and Mike had to pass them.
“I put my hand up and said ‘Excuse me please, excuse me,’” and “we slithered our way to the front. We got some dirty looks,” Mike says, laughing.”We were weaving around people and he was focusing on the course… looking out for train tracks or big puddles or big holes.
Mike and Ivonne are a team. “I know her really well, and I can feel her body temperature” and what’s happening with her the whole time, Mike says.
“I’ll sometimes start singing,” Ivonne says. “My favorite is ‘country roads, take me home, to the place…’”
“Sometimes it gets quiet and someone starts that song and it gets us loosened up a bit,” Mike says. “At first, everyone around us thought we were nuts,” but “then a lot of people joined us along the way.”
It was mid-race and people were getting tired. “Then here we come in this pack, singing, breathing, chatting. Our energy comes at a good moment for people,” Ivonne says.
Within months of the diagnosis, the baby’s family moved from Colombia to New York City, where some of the best retinoblastoma doctors could be found. The doctors at New York Presbyterian Hospital removed the baby’s eyes, replaced them with ocular prostheses, and quashed the cancer with radiation and chemotherapy.
At mile 14, the girls from Wellesley College were screaming like nuts. “You can hear those Wellesley girls from a mile away,” says Mike, who likes to give high-fives to people in the crowd. When the crowd screams like that, “you lose your senses and you don’t feel pain anymore.”
With every step, Ivonne focused on maintaining her pace. “Neither of us were wearing a watch,” but we kept a steady rhythm through the race “just going by feel,” averaging just under an 8-minute mile, Mike says. But by the end, Ivonne and Mike felt really good and started moving faster. Two of the friends who started the race with them fell back, unable to keep the pace.
“For the last six miles, nobody passed us…we just passed people” Mike says.
Around mile 23 or 24, they had their fastest mile, somewhere around 7 minutes. “It was crazy how good we felt,” Mike says.
“Mike can feel if there’s a pop [surge of strength] in my legs,” Ivonne says. When Mike feels that pop, he pushes her to go faster.
“Everyone is cheering, going crazy” at the finish line, Mike says. “You’d be surprised how many people get confused when they see us running attached. I totally forget that she’s blind all the time.”
Ivonne Mosquera finished the Boston Marathon in 3 hours and 26 minutes. The average time for a woman marathoner in the same age group is 4 hours and 59 minutes. Mike Oliva guided her through the race with a tether.
It’s been almost thirty years since the doctors in New York removed Ivonne’s eyes. She is completely blind and has no memories of sight. She has never experienced light or color and cannot visualize three dimensions. Yet she earned a degree in mathematics from Stanford University and taught English as a second language to hospital staff at Stanford Medical Center. She climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest peak in Africa, scrambling up a rocky mountainside at four in the morning. Every day, she takes the New York subway between business school at Baruch College, an internship at IBM, and her home where she lives with her boyfriend. She is training for her seventh marathon and second triathlon.
This is just the beginning for this 88-pound bolt of life.
“When I’m eighty, I still to be there in the park,” Ivonne says. She wants to be where the athletes race, train, warm-up, and stretch. “Even if it’s cheering people on and handing out water, I want to be there.”
Coco Ballantyne is a reporter for HealthDot and ScribeMedia
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