Evan’s Bike

Teenager bikes past own ills to be wheel Samaritan

There are some pretty brave people in the Stanton-Reeves house.

First there is Evan Stanton Reeves, 17, captain of the lacrosse team and a starter on the varsity basketball team at the Trinity School on the upper West Side. In the summer months he rows crew and rides his bike - really rides, say, on 100-mile jaunts.

Evan and his bike

Then there are Evan’s parents: mom, Christine Stanton, and dad, Robert Reeves, and stepfather Jean-Michel Wasterlain, who let their son become the athlete he wanted to be despite his having a serious illness.

Evan has immune thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare and debilitating blood disease in which the body, among other things, consumes platelets, the cell fragments floating in the bloodstream that are instrumental in blood clotting after wounds or bruises.

Too few platelets can lead to excessive bleeding, blood under the skin and infection.

Evan was diagnosed with ITP when he was 5. He’s spent much of his life since undergoing a variety of treatments at the Children’s Cancer and Blood Foundation center at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell.

It has not slowed him down much.

"Evan is an amazing athlete," Christine Stanton said. "He’s always been very, very physically active. He’s been a biker his whole life.

"He rode his first 100-mile bike ride when he was 12 years old. He rode across the United States when he was 15 years old."

Eighteen hours after finishing his cross-country ride, Evan had his spleen removed, a radical treatment that seems to have brought his ITP under control.

It was a step the family took reluctantly, out of necessity, Christine said.

"By the time he was 15 it was clear we had to do something, because the drugs were no longer active and he was really attached to lacrosse, which is a violent game," she said. "So we took his spleen."

The spleen, a blood filter, removes platelets from the body. Since the operation, Evan’s platelet counts have been close to normal, his mother said.

But Evan never forgot the other children he saw at the Cancer and Blood Foundation who were battling illnesses that were even more debilitating than his.

So he decided to do something for them. Over the coming Labor Day weekend, from Sept. 2 to 6, the family will drive from their Meatpacking District home to Natchez, Miss.

From there, Evan plans to bike up the famous Natchez Trace to Nashville in four days - a 444-mile trip - to benefit the Cancer and Blood Foundation.

He’s raised $14,000 in pledges so far.

"I chose this route because it has great scenery and not too much traffic," said Evan, who only recently got his jaw unwired after breaking it in a lacrosse game. "Also, historically, it is an important route for trade in America."

The ride will be a family affair. Though Evan will be riding solo, his mother and father will trail him on their bikes part of the day "until the seats get too hard," Christine said.

Christine’s parents will trail the lot of them in a rented truck full of luggage, parts for the bicycles and a few spare seats for folks tired of pedaling.

To learn more about Evan’s bike ride or to make a contribution, contact the Children’s Cancer and Blood Foundation online at www.childrenscbf.org, or call (212) 888-7003.

 

This article was written by Clem Richardson and originally appeared in the New York Daily News on July 30th 2007.

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