Yahoo News ‘I survived a flesh-eating disease — so now I’m rowing across the Pacific’
Planes have never been less fashionable. The chic way to cross an ocean these days, of course, is via yacht. But as Greta Thunberg skips across the Atlantic in a sailing boat , bound for New York, one Londoner is going a step further. Jessica Shuman, 29, is planning to row across the Pacific from California to Hawaii and break a world record in the process.
She and her three crewmates are already fundraising for the June 2020 row but her route here has been anything but simple.
“It’s just an allergic reaction to an antihistamine.” Normally, this is good news from a doctor. But not when you have necrotising fasciitis. In plain English, this is even nastier than it sounds — it’s a flesh-eating bug. When she contracted the infection she was 20 years old and terrified.
After growing up in north London and going to school in Hampstead Shuman studied English at Oxford University. In her second year there she woke up one morning with a swollen leg. “I assumed I’d pulled a muscle, only over the next few days it got bigger.”
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She had also received an innocuous bite on her right calf but had been told by a doctor not to worry too much: “I thought everyone was over-exaggerating.” It was only because her mother was insistent that she went to the city’s John Radcliffe Hospital. By this point, the wound on her calf was full of pus. She could barely walk.
Doctors realised what was happening and worked swiftly. “I had a plastic surgeon who’d come in to mark up where the infection was to cut it out.” Routinely, victims of necrotising fasciitis do survive suffer life-changing injuries — skin grafts, surgery, amputations.
Shuman was able to “escape with both legs intact. It was pretty epic”. She’s chipper now — she works as an asset manager — but the illness had a “profound impact,” she says. And it had a “much slower burn” than she expected. “That experience of being ill, defying the odds, at the age of 20 — it’s not something you expect. It made me realise if you can recover from a disease trying to eat your body from the inside out, your ideas of where your limits lie aren’t true”.
With her Pacific adventure Shuman is testing that theory now, perhaps to destruction. She and her crewmates Susannah Joy, Anna Campbell and Kat Butler need to row about 48 miles a day. Every day. For (hopefully) just under 50 days 19 hours and 14 minutes. They’ll eat dehydrated food — packets of spaghetti bolognese, mushroom risotto, chilli con carne — brought to life with hot water, converted from the briny seawater by a device on their boat.
They’ll also munch chocolate, nuts, dried fruit and other snacks as they try and hit the 4,000 calories a day (twice the average for a woman) they’ll need to keep up the rowing. They will sleep for no more than 90 minutes at a time. Eight hours a night it ain’t.
“I’m terrified, you’d be mad if you weren’t scared,” she says. “But the best things come from putting yourself in a slightly hairy position”.
The four are currently training 12 to 15 hours a week out on the Thames at Fulham and Wallingford (near Oxford) and in the gym. Hard work, Shuman admits, but Wallingford is “beautiful — it’s quite a nice wake-up.” It’s a far cry from the shark-infested Pacific, too.
I’m terrified, you’d be mad if you weren’t scared.
Jessica Shuman
This isn’t her first extreme challenge. “I climbed a mountain in Nepal, rowed across the Irish Sea and have done an ultramarathon in Malawi,” she says.
The four women are raising funds for two charities, Women in Sport and Mates in Mind. The former is self-explanatory, the second, Shuman says, was picked because “it’s as much a mental challenge” as a physical one.
As well as tackling daunting challenges, Shuman has a line in sweet understatement: “You get a bit of a buzz,” she says of her past feats. “It’s a little bit addictive.”
If a little bit of a buzz is all it takes for her to row 2,400 miles ...
Visit gofundme.com/f/dream-dare-do-san-fran-to-hawaii
