BEATNIK BATTLER
It was a year ago almost to the day. After immigrating to New Zealand with my Kiwi wife and son in April of 2016, we started with nothing and built our little business, Beatnik Moto, to a point where we were poised for some great success. I had just finished a landmark project designing, managing, hosting and operating the first-ever Ducati Adventure Tour in New Zealand. And complementary to this, I had built up a fleet of new Ducatis from the original three to a respectable 16 units. We had multiple large group tours on the books, happy customers leaving amazing reviews, an international TV show filming me riding with Hollywood stars, and the retail shop was ticking along very well. After years of struggle, sacrifice and more than one dead-end road, it was looking like we had turned a corner and we would be carried forward by momentum rather than brute force.
It was at this point, mid-December 2019, when I started to have a few strange health symptoms. Symptoms in places where, as men, we don’t want to talk about but know damn well it’s very important to get checked out when things are feeling off in that region. Over the next four weeks, I got the run-around, shifted to multiple apathetic GPs, misdiagnosed at least three times and pushed aside for much-needed CT scans as everyone was “on holiday”. I was in pain, could barely walk, and the symptoms were getting worse... daily. I felt it was serious. How serious it was was the shocker. Finally, after my lovely wife stopped putting up with the system and started to make some noise, I got a CT scan.
I’ll never forget the day we got the call. My wife and I were having lunch with a long-time friend and a call came in asking us to come into the GP’s office. We sat down and got hit with a bomb. Cancer. Advanced colorectal cancer that had spread to my hip bone. Originally it was thought to be Stage 3 and operable/treatable, but further scans over the next days revealed the worst. It was Stage 4 and had spread to my lungs and lymph nodes as well.
At this point, I learned the word “palliative” and was told it was the beginning of the end. The beginning of people looking at me like a lost puppy and talking to me like I was dead already. It was devastating and indescribably sad. There I sat. My life savings sunk in a business that needed at least another year to be practically viable for partnership or sale, no health insurance, a five-year-old son to raise and a wife reeling from this tragic news, wondering what the hell she was going to do without me. Bloody hell, I was in a dark place. Darker than I ever knew existed, and I had no idea what to do next. Decisions needed to be made and made quickly. Business operations, powers of attorney, will updated, on and on, preparing for death.
The first decision was an easy one. I’ve never been a quitter, so I knew I had to fight. Fight like hell and never give up. This was the deal I made with my wife in the first 24 hours, and the fight began almost immediately, flying to Christchurch for five radiation therapy sessions, which essentially involved zapping the main tumour
