Dad won’t cower before cancer
Kerry is battling multiple myeloma but isn’t the type to curl up in a ball over it
The night 12-year-old Ellen Bisley found out her dad had cancer she cried and was lost for words. The diagnosis was a shock, she said, and no one knew what to say.
Seven years on, Ellen is sporting a freshly shorn head, having shed her locks in support of dad Kerry Bisley.
The family are telling their story as part of the campaign for Leukaemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand’s fundraising event, Shave for a Cure. The story will screen on TV and run online. A wider campaign goes for the next four weeks, as the organisation gears up for “Shave Week” next month. Kerry continues to battle multiple myeloma — a cancer of plasma cells that usually arises in the bone marrow. The 54-year-old said it was “controllable”, to a degree.
He was on a raft of medications and described himself as “semi-retired”, largely sticking around their home in Otorohanga, in the Waikato.
He had to give up his full-time job as a chef about three years ago, when the physical toll of full-time work while battling cancer got too much.
“It just got to the point where I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I was getting too tired all of the time.”
It was a necessary break, but Kerry said the excess down-time drove him “up the wall”. So he took on running a coffee cart part-time. He gets up at 5.30am and plants his coffee cart out on the road. He would typically stick around serving coffee to locals until midday but will finish early if he has an off-day.
Meanwhile, Ellen is about to launch into the second semester of her nursing degree. At the time her dad was diagnosed, she wanted to be an architect. She changed her mind, somewhat influenced by her time with her dad in hospital.
“There are just some lovely, lovely people,” she said. “Just seeing how much they really cared for the people they’re looking after, I thought it was really cool.
“Once I got the idea in my head it kind of stuck . . .”
Her visits to his hospital room held a special importance for them. Kerry said Ellen’s daily after-school visits were his silver lining: “It sort of gave me a pick-me-up, it gave me a reason to keep going.”
It was a rough time for Ellen too, who was going through “normal 12-year-old stuff” such as trying to decide which high school to attend.
The night Kerry learned of the cancer, Ellen said her parents had a long talk out of earshot and she wondered what it was about.
“I remember I cried, but I don’t really remember much else. It was all a whirlwind of ‘what’s happening’.”
The months following were a strange period, with the family trying to figure out how to talk about the cancer. But Ellen said her dad’s illness had been hugely influential in bringing them all closer together.
There had been a shift from not knowing how to talk about his illness, to becoming more open with each other about how he was doing, and how everyone felt.
Kerry was determined to live as normally as possible.
“I’ve seen too many people in hospital, lying there waiting for the day to come,” he said.
“They might get told they have six months to live, and it’s like they put a circle on the calendar and that’s what they aim for. That’s not me.”