Getting back on the bike

In late February, Thomas Larson fell down while training. Again.

He was riding his bike downhill through the Morgan Monroe State Forest when he reached for his water bottle. His hands dropped down and he flew headfirst over the handlebars.

“Luckily, my face broke the fall pretty well,” Larson said, only half-joking.

He immediately hopped up and reached for his bike. His first instinct was to check for damage. He was worried the frame had cracked.

What Larson hadn’t noticed was his own injury, which was bad enough to prompt drivers passing by to ask him if he needed help. He waved them all off.

It wasn’t until a woman pleaded with him that Larson took a look in a mirror and realized the extent of his injury. His face was covered in blood. He needed to be taken to a hospital.

The first person he called was Robert Martin, a Delta Upsilon Cycling teammate.
“I’m hurt. I crashed my bike. Can you pick me up?” Larson asked Martin on the phone.
“Oh no, not again,” Martin responded.

When Martin arrived on the scene, Larson was grinning from ear to ear. For Martin, it was an odd sight. Larson’s face was still covered with blood, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Martin drove Larson to the nearest emergency room, where he recalled Larson walking around the hospital like he owned the place. He knew every room and practically everyone’s name.

At this point, Larson was fairly used to hospitals. He had spent the previous six years of his life in and out of them.

He couldn’t remember the exact number of surgeries he has underwent since 2008. He said it’s between 30 and 35, but he’s lost count.

The hospital stay that stands out the most to Larson came 15 months earlier. He went through a triple organ transplant to replace his stomach, pancreas and small intestine.
But this emergency room trip wasn’t as serious. Despite the bloody injury, Larson kept the mood light.

Larson was cracking jokes with nurses as they performed various tests. He even asked if he could inject himself with a shot because he had gotten used to doing it himself in previous hospital stays.

“I shouldn’t have been laughing,” Martin said. “But his head’s bleeding, his leg is cut and his shoulder looks dislocated, and he’s cracking jokes with the nurses, and I’m just cracking up in the corner.

“That’s just Tom.”

***

Thomas Larson knows what it’s like to fall off the bike. The 24-year-old Delta Upsilon rider has fallen down in more than just a bike race. His most adverse falls have sent him to various hospital beds around the Midwest.

At one point after getting sick, Larson’s body weight fell to 83 pounds. He went days without eating. A majority of his time was spent bouncing between hospitals as doctors tried to determine what was wrong with his body.

After years of testing and hospital stays, Larson’s doctors determined the best solution to getting Larson healthy again would be to replace the organs causing him to become ill.
Larson would undergo a triple organ transplant in October 2012 to replace his stomach, pancreas and small intestine.

A little more than four years have passed since then. Now a junior, Larson is set to make his Little 500 debut with his Delta Upsilon teammates.

“There’s a stubbornness about him,” Martin said. “If you tell Tom he can’t do something, he’s going to do it. If you tell him he can’t ride, he’s going to ride.”
Larson got sick, but he got back on the bike.

***

The pain started in October 2009.

Larson was a sophomore. He had rushed Delta Upsilon the previous spring with intentions of riding for the fraternity’s Little 500 team.

He bought his first carbon fiber bike frame in the summer. When Larson wasn’t in class, he was training.

But before Halloween, Larson began experiencing stomach pains. He was admitted to Bloomington Hospital. Doctors performed a number of tests, but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He spent the next few weeks in and out of the hospital.

During that time, Larson stopped eating — nothing tasted good. He only managed to eat whatever food was in the Delta Upsilon house every few days.

Larson’s health deteriorated. He was weak and nobody, not even the doctors, knew why.

“I can only explain it as a hangover,” Larson said. “It just wasn’t right.”

The pain forced Larson to transfer to Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, where he spent three weeks. Larson said doctors performed every test they could think of.

But still, no answers.

The only way Larson could get the nutrients and minerals he needed was through Total Parenteral Nutrition. TPN is used for patients who either cannot or should not receive their nutrition by eating. A needle was placed in Larson’s vein in his arm at night, pumping in the various nutrients he needed to survive.

The TPN treatment continued until mid-February. Larson was transferred to Iowa. Doctors began to think it was a problem in his small intestine.

After doctors pumped in more nutrients and minerals Larson’s body desperately needed, he was told it would be a waiting process.

“There wasn’t much more they could do,” Larson said. “So I went home.”

***

At Larson’s home in Wheaton, Ill., things only got worse.

He still couldn’t eat. He was miserable. Weighing just 83 pounds, his face showed the worse signs of his weight loss. The lines in his cheekbones became completely exposed and his head became soft.

“My head was sort of like a newborn baby’s,” Larson said.

The weight loss caused Larson to become so small that he shopped in the children’s section for clothes. His hair became so frail that when he ran his hand through it, the hair would fall out.

On March 27, 2010, Larson woke up with stomach pain considerably worse than before. He was rushed to emergency surgery at a local hospital. When he woke up a couple of days after the emergency surgery, doctors told him they had removed 19 feet of his small intestine, which the human body needs for absorbing nutrients and minerals.

Just under 50 inches of his small intestine remained. The prognosis from the doctors wasn’t good.

“It was drastic,” Larson said. “Doctors told my parents that I’m never going to live a normal life. You’re just going to have to manage. This is not going to get better and you’re probably going to have to go to a bigger doctor because this is beyond us.”
But Larson wasn’t interested in managing. He didn’t want to be labeled as “sick” or “different.”

He wanted a normal life.

Larson spent most of his 2010 summer in a hospital bed at Northwestern University. He was constantly having tests run. He doesn’t like to think about the surgeries because he says he is passed them at this point in life, but he had one done about every two weeks.

As time passed in the hospital bed, his health started to improve. His body weight returned to a healthy number. He was able to eat again, but he remained on a strict diet.

In fall 2011, normality was still far away. Larson returned to school in Bloomington, but he still spent time in and out of the hospital.

“I was managing,” he said.

But Larson’s health once again took a turn for the worse. He finished the fall semester, barely getting by in his classes. To this day, Larson says he is thankful for his professors understanding his situation.

He returned for the spring semester, but only lasted 10 days.

“I think of those 10 days, nine of them were spent in the hospital,” Larson said. “My condition wasn’t getting any better.”

Larson returned home and spent most of his time resting. His condition remained the same. He wasn’t getting better, but it wasn’t getting too much worse.

Then, on Feb. 9, 2012, Larson collapsed in his home.

He was immediately rushed to the hospital. Again.

***

Four days after his collapse, Larson awoke from a medically induced coma.

His entire small intestine had been removed. He was relying on machines to feed him.

“My system is kind of ghetto rigged,” Larson said. “I was fully dependent on the IV meds. I couldn’t take anything by mouth. If I did, I would throw up.”

Twenty-eight months had passed since Larson initially began to feel sick. With no signs of his health improving, doctors began to look for solutions. The next step was an organ transplant.

Larson didn’t have much choice. He was admitted to the IU Health Hospital in Indianapolis.

When Larson met with the surgeon, he had just one question for him.

“I want to know now, ‘Do I sell my bike? I don’t want to keep it if I’m going to be out for 10 minutes because I’m still decrepit,’” Larson said.

“Oh no,” his surgeon assured him. “I’ve got you.”

Larson wasn’t worried about cycling. He wanted to return to where he was before he started feeling sick.

He wanted to be normal again.

***

October 4, 2012 was a special day for Larson.

Normal came back.

Larson was put on the organ transplant waiting list for a stomach, pancreas and small intestine. Though the small intestine was the problem, it was safer for Larson to replace the whole system.

“The doctors said it was more beneficial to do those three organs because when they do donor organs, it’s like changing the engine of the car instead of the individual parts,” Larson said.

While his classmates were graduating in Bloomington, Larson laid in a hospital bed, waiting for an organ transplant to come.

He got the call he needed on October 3, 2012 — the organs were available.
After waiting 13 weeks for an organ donor, Larson was driven to Indianapolis where at 4:01 p.m. on October 4, 2012, he went into surgery.

The operation was a success. Larson had a new stomach, pancreas and small intestine. He said one of the best parts was simply eating again.

“My first meal was McDonald’s chicken nuggets,” Larson said. “I had fantasized about them for the entire summer.”

He still had therapy to go through, but he was happy.

***

The recovery process for Larson was slow at first. Simple tasks, such as climbing staircases, were difficult.

For a long time, Larson said he couldn’t watch sports. It wasn’t anger — he just wanted it back.

“It was just kind of taunting me,” Larson said. “‘You can’t do this.’”

Doctors kept setting bars for Larson. Every time an expectation was set, he wanted to shatter it. Every bar, he wanted raised.

After the first initial checkpoints were reached, Larson’s recovery started to quicken.

Before long, Larson was walking. Walking quickly turned into jogging, jogging into running.

Normal didn’t seem too far away.

***

“The bike will wait for you.”

It was a message from Christian Vande Velde, who rode in the Tour De France for the U.S. Postal Service team.

Vande Velde is from Lemont, Ill., only 20 miles from Larson’s home. Vande Velde was getting maintenance on his bike at a shop where Alpha Chi Omega rider Kelsey Tharnstrom worked. She told him of Larson’s story and he wrote the message, along with his autograph, on a plain piece of white paper.

Larson got it framed.

“It just felt good hearing from someone else like him,” Larson said. “It was hard seeing my friends graduate from college, doing adult things, having responsibilities. It was just nice to hear from someone close to home.”

The first time Larson got back on his bike was at home.

It was 20 degrees outside. When his father saw him taking the bike from the house, he told his son there was no way he would be able to go out.

“So I took that as, ‘Alright. I’m going out now,’” Larson said.

Larson hopped on his bike and almost immediately fell over. He laughed it off and started again.

He made it 3 miles from his house when he started to feel pain.

“I thought, ‘Oh man this is brutal,’” Larson recalled, laughing.

But that cold winter day was the start. Each day Larson would push himself a little bit further.

His goal was always to go the farthest on the fourth of each month — the anniversary of his surgery. He challenged himself to ride a path he hadn’t done before or to go somewhere new.

“It kept me motivated,” Larson said. “I kept saying, ‘What am I going to do this month?’”

After months of training, Larson got back into competitive shape. For the first time in years, he had no setbacks.

In summer 2013, Larson’s road to the Little 500 began.

***

It took five years, but in December, Larson finally got his own kit.

“This was the first year that I didn’t get hand-me-downs,” Larson said. “I think I wore that DU kit four out of five days at the track.”

To an outsider, the kit was just a blue and yellow jacket and spandex.

But to Larson, it was a sign that he had made it.

“On the track, every team kind of recognizes each other by the kit,” he said. “It was just kind of cool to finally be — it sounds lame — but part of the team.”
 
When Martin first got a text from Larson asking to ride, he wasn’t prepared for how serious Larson was.

“He came out and was in his full kit,” Martin said. “He had his carbon fiber bike, legs shaved. He was ready to go.”

Thirty miles of riding later, Larson was keeping up with Martin and the other riders. His months of preparation had paid off.

Martin was impressed.

“We hammered it out for a good afternoon,” Martin said. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re an asset to this team.’”

From that moment on, Larson wasn’t just back on the team. He was back where he had been, nearly four years earlier. He was riding for Delta Upsilon in the Little 500.

“I wanted this illness to have a definite beginning and a definite end,” Larson said. “I wanted to pick it up right where I left off with these guys.

“It was over.”