CLEVELAND — Dr. Shubham Gupta and nurse practitioner Kara Richey met nine years ago at a medical conference in North Carolina.
"I asked her to go out for drinks at a biker bar," Dr. Gupta says laughing.
Eventually the couple landed in Cleveland and became engaged in 2019.
"We were supposed to get married in 2020, but something about a city called Wuhan, and then that didn't happen," Dr. Gupta said in obvious reference to the pandemic.
Richey added, "It was literally March, we sent out our save the dates and three days later the world shut down."
Unlike others who postponed pandemic year wedding plans, they had additional stress. Dr. Gupta is a urologist, Richey works in medical oncology, Both see cancer patients at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center.
Richey says when the pandemic began, some patients began skipping their cancer treatments. She feared they'd return with worse disease, meanwhile she had to prepare for a whole new type of patient.
"While we were less busy we were preparing to have to go to COVID units and training," Richey said.
Richey spent most of her career in cancer care. She's learned much from her patients too, especially those who share their regrets about working so much they put off bucket list dreams.
Along the way in the couple's relationship, they discovered a mutual love of hiking and climbing. They married last September. After dealing with the pandemic, they realized it was time to seize the moment.
They decided they would climb 19,341 feet to the top of East Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro.
"For us, what we do on a daily basis, taking care of patients, does define us to a very large degree so it's a recognition of that and also a way to honor our patients," Dr. Gupta said.
"We just never wanted to wait to do something that we've wanted to do because our bucket list tends to just get scratched off and added to rather than piled up, because of our life outlook," Richey said.
They teamed up with some of Dr. Gupta's friends from medical school and began the four and a half day journey up the mountain. They slept in tents on patches of mountain where they couldn't move, it was cold, they couldn't shower and they had to battle the effects of changing altitude and the difficulty it takes to breathe. The summit hike took seven hours in the middle of the night, one slow step at a time.
"That trip up was brutal but getting up there, you are so tired, you cannot breathe, you can barely see, but then you see the sunrise and you see that you are at the top it's phenominal," Richey said.
At the top, they honored their patients and their calling with a Seidman Cancer Center flag.
"I'm sure we carry around the patients that we've cared for in some way and we do a lot of what we do as far as achievements, for them, that was a really big reason for taking the Seidman flag up there," Richey said.
Dr. Gupta called the climb difficult but sublime. Looking back on the last two years he realized he'll find the time to fill that bucket list. It took just a day and a half to climb down the mountain, but by the end, they'd been bit by the climbing bug and plan to do more.
"Life is short and we have a lot of responsibilities on a day to day basis, but it's our thought that you have to seize the moment," Dr. Gupta said.
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