THIBODAUX, La. (AP) - When Andy Sninsky first passed through Thibodaux in July 1968, he was a 19-year-old college student on a 42-day cycling trip from California to New York via Florida.
Forty-eight years later, Sninsky pedaled through the city again to raise awareness about multiple myeloma cancer and encourage those battling cancer.
“I’m always thinking about not giving up,” said Sninsky, who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2008. “I’m also thinking about seeing the same things that I saw in 1968 with a new eye, a second life.”
Sninsky is finishing up a journey from Houston to New Orleans, but in 1968 the California native and a friend had set out on a 4,226-mile cycling journey with a bike and little else.
He was staying at a jail in Lake Charles when a patrolman suggested he stop by Thibodaux.
After arriving in Thibodaux and being interviewed for a Daily Comet article, he stayed with the newspaper’s publisher and spent the next day exploring the area by pirogue before heading to New Orleans.
“That trip was life changing in that I was a 19-year-old kid starting college seeing the south for the first time at the end of the Civil Rights Era looking for alligators and having fun,” he said.
Sninsky eventually graduated from college, joined the Army where he worked as a lifeguard at an officers’ club pool and then started his career as a whitewater rafting guide in various parts of the world.
Everything was going well until about eight years ago when he was working on his property in Costa Rica.
“I was swinging a machete and something snapped,” he said. “I thought I broke a rib.”
He went to the doctor who explained broken ribs needed time to heal, but he continued to lose strength.
A few months later in Europe, Sninsky was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer formed by malignant plasma cells. Doctors estimated he had about four years to live.
He was admitted into the hospital in May 2008 and underwent 15 bouts of radiation through June, dropping weight until he was only 119 pounds.
“That’s how much I was being attacked and eaten from the inside out,” he said. “I was a walking cadaver.”
With the help of some Cistercian monks who let him recover at their monastery in the woods surrounding Vienna, Sninsky regained enough strength to undergo eight months of chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant.
After the transplant Sninsky’s health continued to improve and in spring 2010 he was ready to get back on the bicycle.
“My wife said ’No way. If you fall down you’re going to get paralyzed because of your bone damage.’ But I said if I don’t get on it I’ll die because I’m an active kind of a person,” he said.
He started off slow, pedaling about 10 miles out of town.
“Just long enough that I would feel I’m no longer a trapped person or someone without a future,” he said.
Shortly after, he decided to start retracing sections of his 1968 cycling trip each to spread the word about multiple myeloma cancer and hope of recovery.
“I try to show them you shouldn’t give up,” he said. “Even with the cancer the idea is you’re going to either get better or not. But if you just resign yourself to there’s nothing you can do, it’s a big mistake because you’ve got to keep fighting.”
Things are a little different this time around. Instead of covering roughly 100 miles a day, he averages about 50 or 60. Rather than sleeping in jails and Salvation Armys, he’s staying with family, friends and fellow cyclists he’s met through the internet.
“I don’t need to prove anything,” he said. “I need to see people, talk to people, enjoy what I’m doing.”
He’s also documenting his annual cycling trips through www.crazyguyonabike.com/volcandy and raising money for the Myeloma Foundation through bicyclemojave.myeloma.org.
Through it all, he never forgets that doctors told him in 2008 he had four years to live.
“I’ve doubled it nearly and I’m still going strong,” he said.
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Information from: Daily Comet, https://www.dailycomet.com
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