Luke Grenfell-Shaw has a rare form of cancer. It started as a pain in his shoulder and the tumour spread to his lungs, making it stage four. The Oxford graduate was teaching English in Siberia when he suffered shoulder pain and saw the school nurse. It was her reaction to a lump on his back that sent him back home to Bristol. “I was 24 years old. I had done an ultra marathon,” Luke said. “48 hours later, I was back in hospital in the UK.” On the 19 June 2018, doctors told Luke that he had cancer.
“I had kind of worked out that it was cancer, but what kind of blew me away was the fact that it was stage four cancer,” says Luke. “That day, my life felt like it had disintegrated. My life had been comfortable and conventional. I worked hard and got rewards in terms of education, jobs, things like that. That was all taken away.” On the day of his diagnosis, Luke had one clear thought in his mind that he wanted to cycle around the world. It was something he had always hoped to do, but the cancer news made him realize that he couldn’t put it off.
“I realized that the future had to become now,” Luke explains. He decided to cycle from Bristol to Beijing — more than 5,000 miles — on a tandem bike, because he wants to bring people along to share the experience with him. Luke will not only be joined by family and friends for certain legs of his trip, but also by other young people who are living with cancer. “This trip is something I’m going to enjoy,” says Luke. “It’s going to be the richest and most fulfilling experience that I can have.”
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