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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels May 12, 2004 Writing the Pine Now this is a real extreme athlete Joe Zavala Bobby McMullen walks likes an extreme athlete, talks like an extreme athlete and rides his mountain bike downhill at speeds up to 30 mph like an extreme athlete. He just can't see like one. He's blind. That's right. McMullen, a 41-year-old outdoor enthusiast who competed in the 13th-annual Spring Thaw Mountain Bike Festival in Ashland last week, can't see worth beans. He's blind out of his left eye and has 20-1,200 vision out of his right. How bad is that? McMullen says its like looking through a rolled up piece of paper with Vaseline gooped over the opening. "My life is a blurry paradise," he says. Actually, anatomically speaking it's more like a disaster. Besides the eye thing (more on that later) McMullen has already had two kidney transplants and two pancreas transplants, the last coming in 2003. It gets worse. Almost a year to the day after his first transplant in '98, and just before he was slated to ski in the Nagano Para-Olympics, he broke the little toe on his right foot. The doctors didn't think he could stand the pain, but they asked anyway. "I said, 'Come on, I just went through a double transplant,' McMullen recalls. "'Hell yeah.'" McMullen ended up "settling" for fourth in the downhill. Meanwhile, his toe swelled up so big they had to cut a whole in his ski boot. "They amputated my toe - that was my big trip to Nagano," he said. Don't look now But that snip barely qualified as a surgery by McMullen's standards. His problems started when he was diagnosed with diabetes at age 12. That didn't stop him from going to law school, but those plans were amputated too when, at 29, he was diagnosed with an extreme case of Proliferative Diabetic Retinotathy. Don't bother typing that in to Google; the definition won't do it justice. Basically, just imagine the worst possible eyeball ache ever and add blood. "What happens," McMullen describes in horrid detail, "is you have problems with circulation � in your eyes, and when this happens it tells your body to grow blood vessels and bleed." Then, in a scene right out of Hellraiser, the blood drained into McMullen's eyes. Doctors eventually performed an experimental surgery in an attempt to save at least a glimmer of light for McMullen. It worked - kind of. The left eye's useless, but the right is ever so slightly functional. He has no depth perception, so everything looks flat. In optimal light conditions - when was the last time you worried about that while taking a corner on your Trek - he can pick up shapes and colors. "It's like skiing in a white out," McMullen says. So what do you do when your blind as a bat in one eye, and see the world as a blurry painting in the other. Ride bikes really fast past large rocks and trees, of course. Which brings us to what McMullen was doing in Ashland last week during a Southern Oregon Mountain Bike Association event. The picture in Tuesday's Tidings tells it all. He rides behind his guide, currently Jason Allen, who's responsible for calling out important little directions, like: "Right, Right!" and "Bump, bump!" He doesn't ride with a special handicap group, either. In the Spring Thaw downhill event, held May 2, he finished the 1.7-mile course in 7 minutes, 19.23 seconds, good enough for 96th out of 106 riders. McMullen isn't impressed with himself. "I just love to ride my bike and I happen to be visually impaired," he said. His guide sees things a little more clearly. "He's basically a walking miracle." DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams