Detour To Tumortown
By Rob Barbee
()
About this ebook
This memoir details Rob Barbee’s sudden, surreal transformation from tourist to patient, eight thousand miles from home: Rob and his wife, Kathy, both seasoned travelers, are just two days into a month-long cruise when their course is abruptly diverted—to the realm of cancer.
When Rob’s alarming symptoms land him in a hospital bed in the Middle Eastern country of Oman, the couple faces a wholly different kind of exotic adventure that the one they had planned. As they desperately wait an emergency evacuation to the US so that Rob can begin treatment in familiar surroundings, what they learn here about the compassionate practice of medicine and the love of strangers leaves them forever changed.
This is an astonishing, inspiring, surprisingly humorous story fo one couple’s navigation through terrifying unknowns, and a celebration of human connections that transcend nationality, politics, and religion.
Rob Barbee
Rob Barbee has traveled throughout the world, to more than seventy-five countries and all seven continents. In 1967, he flew fifty-one combat missions in Vietnam as a B-52 navigator. He is also an award winning watercolor artist, obtaining awards and placement in several national watercolor exhibitions. Now retired from a long career in civil engineering, he lives with his wife in Greenville, South Carolina.
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Detour To Tumortown - Rob Barbee
Dispatch No. 1:
The Cruise and the Crisis
Place: Aboard the Oceania cruise ship Nautica, off the coast of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Date: November 22, 2016
My wife of fifty-one years, Kathy, and I were on the second day of a scheduled thirty-day cruise from Dubai to Cape Town. We were looking forward to seeing friends in India, and seeing a number of countries on the east coast of Africa that we had never visited. And we were eagerly anticipating a post-cruise safari at a remote tent camp in the Sanbona Wildlife Reserve, four hours north of Cape Town. In the five years since I retired at seventy-one and Kathy at sixty-nine, we have enjoyed our good health and the fruits of our labor by traveling the world. In that period, we have been to almost seventy countries and all seven continents. We love invigorating, challenging activities like hiking and camping. We have zip-lined through the rain forest canopies of Costa Rica and Hawaii, hunted with the Wahadzabe Bushmen of Tanzania, slept in a Bedouin tent in the Jordanian desert, hiked glaciers in Antarctica, and ridden camels in Jordan and elephants in Thailand.
That either of us would relish retirement was almost unthinkable, just six or seven years before. I enjoyed my career as a principal civil engineer with one of the largest international engineering and construction firms in the world. Likewise, Kathy, as director of school social work services for our 70,000-student county school district, enjoyed her work immensely. Childless by choice, we typified the freedom and prosperity of those couples known as DINKs—double income, no kids. For that, we have no regrets. We worked very hard for five decades, lived well below our means, and in retirement, began to reap our rewards.
Were it not for the economic downturn that eventually hit the construction industry in 2011, and the sudden death of our beloved dog, Tyler, both of us would probably still be working. After Tyler died in Kathy’s arms, neither of us could stand to be in the house with his absence. I had been retired for ten months, and Tyler had been my constant companion. Kathy dreaded coming home after work. We knew we had to get away.
And what better way to escape than to take a cruise around the world for three and a half months, I thought. I visited a travel agency and booked a Princess World Cruise of 107 days. It took a lot of persuading, and not a few anguished tears from Kathy, before she finally agreed to retire. In January, 2012, we boarded the Pacific Princess in Fort Lauderdale to see the world, along with a ship full of, what we then considered the geriatric set.
My parents joined the ranks of the retired when I was in my forties. I disdained their seemingly carefree spirit as they flitted from one travel experience to the next, coming home chattering endlessly about the things they had seen and the people they had met. Bor-ring, I thought. You’d never catch me on a cruise ship with a bunch of rickety, cane-wielding, white-haired has-beens. Now that I have happily become one of them, I see my youthful prejudices for what they were—pure jealousy.
I also learned from this that our perception of what passes for enjoyment changes. Maybe it’s the dawning realization that in our younger days, we weren’t really as hip as we thought.
On this second day of our cruise, Kathy and I spent four hours dune bashing
in the desert, an hour’s drive out of Abu Dhabi. It was exhilarating and stomach-churning: Our expert driver charged the four-wheel-drive vehicle up sand dunes ten stories high, snapping the steering wheel suddenly at the crest to dump the vehicle precipitously to one side, then sending it plunging down the steep slope, steering into the fall, and feathering the brake at just the right moment to keep it from tumbling over. We grabbed the overhead roll bars as the car dropped out from under us like a plunging roller coaster. And like a roller-coaster ride, it made us scream and laugh like high-schoolers.
Later that evening, we went through a familiar ritual as Kathy called upon