Mercy dash
Mum’s 20,000km race to dying son
I heard of someone who had travelled from Lima to Cusco to get to their family underneath fruit crates on the back of a truck. And I would have done that.
Vikki Blundell
Ryan, 22, was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in early June. Vikki desperately navigated her way back from Covid lockdown in Peru to be with him in Hamilton, enduring a 20-day, 20,000km journey.
Last Saturday, they finally reunited. Reporter Tom Dillane and visual journalist Mike Scott were there.
Even in the seconds before Vikki Blundell finally saw her son Ryan, time could not move fast enough. A 20,000km, pandemic-clogged journey was down to its final step.
A locked door on a quiet residential street beneath a clear Hamilton sky was the final barrier on her 20-day journey of “horrific” road trips, deserted airports and hotel quarantine.
Vikki had nervously run the last 10m from her brother’s parked camper van, across the damp yard, to Ryan’s rental house.
Poised, almost shaking, on the doorstep, she let swell the emotional burden of her absence from Ryan.
“Just want to get in there,” she says.
The past two days had been consumed by inexplicable anticipation.
“I was aware, the last two days of quarantine, it was almost like I was emotionally numb,” Vikki says.
“It’s just been so hard, and so much waiting, the emotional responses are numb. It was a strange thing to be aware of.
“It seemed to take ages for him to open the door. Like, I’m knocking on the door and he’s not there. So I don’t know how long it actually was but, for me, it felt like forever. I wanted him to be at the door so I could see him. See for myself.”
Inside, she would enter the new reality for her 22-year-old son, Ryan Grieve, a reality she had only known through technological lifelines — calls and messages sourced through remote, rudimentary locations.
A cell tower off a Peruvian desert highway. A Wi-Fi hub in a deserted
Miami Airport terminal. Constantly grasping for a signal.
It was a reality she had denied when she first heard it in Peru almost seven weeks ago.
Her youngest son of three children, Ryan had terminal liver cancer. He told his mother himself. The news, in her mind, dwarfed the chaos that was permeating the globe.
that Hamilton door, she is about to become part of Ryan’s tangible world. It is a need that has consumed her waking thoughts.
“The whole thing was ‘I just need to get to Ryan. I just need to get to Ryan’,” Vikki recites a familiar mantra.
After what seems an age waiting on the stoop — 10 seconds when timed — the door opens. Slowly. Softly.
“Hi Mum.”
They embrace there on the threshold and hold it for a still moment, eyes closed.
Then a smile, a laugh, and a casual: “Did you want a coffee?”
Inside, an almost disorientated relief fizzes off Vikki as she comes to terms with the reunion, eyes darting around the dim house.
Standing in the kitchen, Ryan rinses the plunger and offers coffee to those in the room.
Pleasantries and trivialities of the day are exchanged — who has visited and who has said they will.
A calm before a deeper chat, perhaps.
Ryan is noticeably slight, despite being rugged up in beanie, hoodie and track pants.
The morning is cold but there is warmth and composure in his face as he greets people.
Then abruptly that world is closed, for them to experience privately.
“We’ll have a family day today. Interview tomorrow,” Ryan says.
And they are alone to relive Vikki’s three-week journey, and their future together.
Ryan’s initial diagnosis shortly after he did, courtesy of an online call through Facebook Messenger on June 9.
The 53-year-old mother of three was living in the city of Cusco, in the Peruvian Andes.
About 900km inland from the west coast of South America, the city sits on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.
Vikki had become one of the ancient city’s roughly half a million residents in 2017.
A life epiphany of sorts saw her abandon a corporate career in New Zealand as general manager of the Graeme Dingle Foundation, and she was in the process of setting up a tourism business in her new “home”.
That June 9 call was one neither mother nor son remembers fondly.
“I had to ring her on Messenger and it wasn’t easy telling your mum — your parent — you’re not going to get better,” Ryan says.
“So it’s a hard thing to do. It’s rough. But it needed to be done.” It was not a fluent conversation. “[It was] denial at first.
“You know, with any parent I would deny it too for as long as possible,” he says.
Vikki is less kind to herself when reflecting on her reaction that night.
“I just didn’t believe it,” she says. “He’s a fit healthy young man and my instant response was the doctors didn’t know what they were talking about: ‘It’s wrong, don’t worry about it. We’ll sort out whatever this issue is but it won’t be what they’re saying it is.’”
It took Vikki hours afterwards to realise what she had said.
“Later that night I thought, ‘Well, whether it’s accurate or not, that’s what Ryan’s been told, so that’s what Ryan’s dealing with’,” she says.
“I don’t think I handled that phone conversation very well and I felt really bad for Ryan. So I called him back the next day and said, ‘Sorry for my response.’
“Then it started dawning on me, this is what he and we are dealing with.”
Once that reality had dawned on Vikki, the sole question was “How can I get back?”
time in early June, Peru was still in a full lockdown that was to last
107 days.
The country of 32 million people sits sixth on the world tally of Covid-19 confirmed infections with more than
360,000 cases and more than 13,000 deaths.
Vikki was only allowed to leave the house to buy food, go to the bank or get medical attention.
“That meant no internal travel. So I didn’t know how I would actually be able to get out of the country.
“I just knew that I would,” Vikki says.
“I was getting out. I heard of someone who had travelled from Lima to Cusco to get to their family underneath fruit crates on the back of a truck.
“And I would have done that. I was going to be coming home.”
Vikki knew from emails from the New Zealand Embassy that there was a flight out of Peru to the US with Eastern Airlines.
In June, Air New Zealand was flying out of Los Angeles five times a week.
“I knew if I was able to get to LA, I would be able to get home,” Vikki says.
This proved no easy feat.
On June 10, the morning after Ryan’s call, Vikki called Eastern Airlines and was told the next flight from Lima to Miami was full.
But two days later Vikki received a call from the airline to say they had contacted all the passengers on that flight “until someone agreed to give up their seat”.
Retelling this, Vikki begins to cry. “I don’t know who that person is, but I could still be there waiting, so I’d love to know who that person is,” she says. “People are amazing.”
But securing a plane seat on a flight from Lima to Miami was only one of the four legs of her trip — albeit the most tenuous one.
There was still the major complication of how Vikki would make the 1300km journey from her home city of Cusco to Lima to make that flight.
Vikki discovered a Facebook group called Americans stuck in Peru, members of which she says “wrapped around” her to assist.
A WhatsApp group was then set up to solve Vikki’s regional Cusco-to-Lima travel dilemma.
“There were people who said: ‘Don’t you worry about a thing we will get you out. If it has to be an air force flight out of Cusco, don’t worry.’ “Complete strangers,” Vikki says. What they found at short notice was a 28-hour chartered minivan, with three other passengers, leaving on June 22.
“It was an epic journey. The road trip from Cusco to Lima was the worst road trip I have ever done and I have done some wicked road trips.
“It was horrific,” Vikki says.
“I had thought it would be a bus, but it was a minivan, so the seats didn’t go back.
“It was a challenging journey anyway because you’re going up through the Andes and it’s Peruvian roads, which are not like New Zealand roads. You literally get thrown around the corners.
“Loud music the whole time. Very few toilet stops. It was a physically tough journey.”
Finally in Lima, on June 23, Vikki spent a day of waiting to be processed outside the US Embassy, in order to board her Eastern Airlines flight to Miami.
On June 24, the flight departed out of a Lima air force base.
“We were jam-packed on that flight like sardines,” she says.
“It was a huge plane.
“I arrived in Miami that night thinking, ‘Yay, there'll be a food court. I can eat,’ and there was nothing. Nothing was open.
“I thought a big airport like that might have sleeping pods and I could get a good night’s sleep.
“Nothing. I was on the hard black seats, very cold, very hungry, very thirsty.”
The next morning, once through security in Miami Airport, Vikki was able to buy a $46 Cobb salad.
“That was my first meal in three days, really,” Vikki says.
The flight to LA had a brief onehour stopover in Dallas, and at 9pm that day, June 25, Vikki boarded her Air NZ flight back to Auckland.
“Air NZ didn’t have us jam-packed in. We had proper meals. It was like
I’m home, I made it.”
I’m so deeply appreciative of the wonderful support of humanity in general. A complete stranger gave up their seat on the plane for me.
Vikki Blundell, mother
BACK ON Kiwi soil on June 27, Vikki’s reunion with Ryan couldn’t happen immediately. First she had to go into Covid-19 quarantine at the Crowne Plaza in Auckland.
“The quarantine part I knew about, but I hadn’t really thought about what that would be like.
“We went from the airport on the bus, straight to the quarantine property. I was happy it was Auckland,” Vikki says.
“I felt like if it was in Hamilton [quarantine] it would be so near, yet so far.”
Vikki says for the first three days of quarantine she just slept.
“I wouldn’t have been able to function if it wasn’t for quarantine. That wave of jetlag,
“I haven’t felt it like that before, but I could just feel myself going unconscious.”
Vikki relished getting some fresh air and exercise mid-afternoon while recuperating from her trip.
But that comfort was quickly taken away.
A quarantine official at the Crown Plaza told Vikki that if someone there tested positive for Covid-19, anyone who was in contact with that person would go into mandatory quarantine at a different property for 28 days.
“So that’s it for me. No more leaving the room because there was no way I was going to risk another 28 days. I needed to get to Ryan,” Vikki says.
“Ten days in one room, 24/7, that was challenging. No sunlight, no fresh air.
“The windows opened about four inches, and if I sat in the far corner of the window I could watch the sunrise and get sunlight for literally five minutes.”
On July 11, Vikki received her final negative Covid-19 test and left the Crown Plaza at about 10am.
She was picked up by her Auckland-based brother, Rodney Blundell, in his RV, and travelled the last few hundred kilometres to the Hamilton suburb of Fairfield to be reunited with Ryan.
Her journey had amounted to 20,000km, spanning 20 days, across three countries.
“The waiting was excruciatingly difficult but it is what it is; at least I had a plan and, every leg, I was so appreciative that it was done and nothing had gone wrong.”
“I’m so deeply appreciative of the wonderful support of humanity in general. A complete stranger gave up their seat on the plane for me.
“It’s meant that I’m here now and we don’t know how things are going to go. It’s not like every month matters. Every day matters.”
SPEAKING ON July 12, the day after the reunion, Ryan is frank about his situation.
He refuses to worry about details that no longer make any difference to the inevitability of his terminal liver cancer diagnosis.
Fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma. That name, too, is merely a detail.
He has accepted the reality of his situation, and, in his mind, there is little need to elaborate on it beyond that. He doesn’t want to know how long he may have left.
“I think it would drive me nuts knowing that anyway,” Ryan laughs.
Because he is unaware of his prognosis, so is everyone else — besides his local Hamilton GP and the oncologists at Waikato Hospital.
Even for these doctors, it is remarkably recent news.
Ryan was first diagnosed on June 9. “I knew something was wrong but I didn’t figure I had the cream of the crop of bad stuff,” he says of the symptoms.
Before they appeared, the 22-yearold Hamiltonian was completing a light fabrication apprenticeship at
PFS Engineering after completing a welding apprenticeship as a teenager.
The first test was an MRI that revealed what doctors judged was terminal liver cancer.
On June 15, a biopsy confirmed that diagnosis.
“It can’t be operated on or anything, so it’s a one-way street,” Ryan says.
While Ryan has refused a timeframe to gauge the cancer’s progress, the mounting toll of the illness can’t be ignored.
“It has its time when it’s rough and painful. Then it comes right again and then it happens again,” Ryan says.
“I mean, it’s cancer. It’s going to do stuff. If I go out for too long it starts to feel like I’m being stabbed on my side and I get exhausted quite easily. And I just feel tired on a daily basis.”
New Zealand Cancer Society medical director and oncologist Dr Chris Jackson says the frequency with which stage 4, incurable cancer, is diagnosed is “far more common than we would like”.
“A first diagnosis of incurable cancer is unfortunately very common. Being diagnosed with incurable cancer is about 25 to 30 per cent [overall]. That’s a pretty high number,” says Jackson — who is not Ryan’s doctor.
“It’s equally common if people have non-specific, or hard-to-localise symptoms, or have symptoms that are looked into and it’s discovered the cancer has already spread somewhere else.
“Liver cancer often spreads to the extent where you can’t take it out for a number of reasons — the liver may have invaded the major blood vessels, or the remaining liver may be sufficiently unhealthy that it can’t survive an operation.”
At the news of his initial diagnosis in early June, Ryan’s uncle Grant Blundell and step-brother Connor Howard, both based in Northland, immediately travelled down to be with him.
Grant has been sleeping on a mattress in his van outside the rental house Ryan shares with two flatmates.
“My uncle, when he found out, he came down and decided he was going to live on the lawn,” Ryan laughs.
“So that’s what he’s done. He’s been making me coffees and lunches and whatnot, which has been awesome.”
His 19-year-old step-brother Connor also dropped everything in Kait¯aia and jumped on a nine-hour bus trip to be close to Ryan indefinitely.
He has been sleeping on the livingroom floor of Ryan’s place.
“I knew anything else I was going to try to do I wasn’t going to be able to focus on.
“So I thought the best thing I could do was to get down there and cater to his every whim,” Connor says. “I’ve always looked up to him a lot.”
For the most part, the days have been spent hanging out playing PlayStation and providing just a bit of basic assistance with day-to-day chores: shopping and driving to appointments.
“He can’t be in any uncomfortable positions for any length of time. So car trips aren’t all that great for him,” Connor says.
“Even getting up to refill his water bottle. I’ll do that. Just the little things.”
Connor says he’s begun to intuitively know how Ryan is feeling physically, as he attends a consistent stream of social events and dinners with friends.
“Usually one look and I can tell what’s going on in the moment but, for the most part, I’ll let him tell me if he needs something.
“He doesn’t need people badgering him. But he can get tired in the evening.”
The proximity to Ryan’s changed life has also made Connor reflect on his own.
“It’s a big wake-up to real life. This is something that actually matters rather than little things,” he says.
“I mean, there’s been definitely a lot of sad moments, but it’s really good to be able to help him and create more memories now, which is really what I think about whenever I’m getting a bit down about it.
“I just count myself lucky that I’m able to be there.”
AND THEN there is Vikki, who has been part of the Hamilton family gathering for two weeks now.
Despite the trials she faced in getting there, Vikki’s Covid-19 journey did allow her to reflect on how to approach the future alongside Ryan.
“I said to a friend, ‘I’ve been aware, especially during quarantine, that I’ve got this voice of Yoda in my head sometimes,’” Vikki says.
“So occasionally if my mind goes ‘Why is this happening? It’s not fair?’ I’m aware of that and it’s a path to the dark side.
“It’s a waste of energy. It’s not what Ryan needs, it doesn’t achieve anything and you go down a black hole.
“If it creeps up, it’s gone straight away. It’s no use to anyone being like that.”
“It’s the worst thing any . . . you know if I could swap places with him I would, but I can’t,” Vikki says.
“So I will walk the journey with Ryan. He’s on a journey. It is happening, and he won’t be doing it alone. I’ll be whatever he needs.
“We’ve had a lifetime of practice, just getting through life together as a family.”
But what does Ryan need? Beside his loved ones near him.
If he is simply putting on a brave face trying to convince himself he is resigned to his plight then he may be the best actor on Earth.
Because there is no trace of resentment in his face as he talks.
There is no nagging sense of false positivity in his philosophy to make each day as good as it can be, and be satisfied with that.
It is genuine.
“You’ve just got to try and find peace with every day.
“Try and make sure you have a good day and that’s about it really, ha. That’s how I’ve been living my life, so it’s been quite good.”
And what of seeing his mum for the first time in their new, changed reality?
The woman who navigated a locked-down world from the edge of the Amazon jungle to find her own peace with him.
“Oh well, it was awesome. Your mum’s come back from being away for ages. You know it’s always a good time. Yeah, it’s very good to have Mum back.”