Alarm bells rang for Hamilton man Kerry Bisley when he was driving home from Rotorua and fell asleep on the side of the road for three hours in 2012.
The 49-year-old told his doctor that for a few weeks, his body hadn’t been feeling right and things just weren’t gelling.
“They told me I had a sleep apnoea, but then a horrendous pain began in my back and I went to the emergency unit at Waikato Hospital. They said I had kidney stones.”
Then Kerry received a call from his doctor telling him he had stage four myeloma.
“I sat in my car for an hour,” says Kerry.
I was thinking, I have a wife and a 13-yearold daughter, my life has turned upside down.
While he was lost in thought he received a call from a good friend in Australia.
“He knew immediately something was wrong, so he became the first person I told,” says Kerry.
“My friend said to me “just remember you can’t kill gorse with weed killer”.
Kerry then got in touch with Leukaemia & Blood Cancer New Zealand (LBC) where he started attending the Waikato Myeloma Group to find out more about the disease, but what he found shocked him.
“For the first support group I walked in and I was looking around thinking I had come to my mother’s house for tea. Most of the people were quite a bit older than me and even asked me who I was there with. I had to tell them I was there for me.”
Kerry says it was then that he realised he was very young in the myeloma world with many thinking it was an “old man’s cancer.”
“I’ve learnt a lot from people who have had it for a long time. I knew nothing about myeloma, what better way than to learn from people who have it themselves?”
Kerry, a natural people person, found that cracking jokes became his coping mechanism, but the problem he faced was making those outside of his support group feel comfortable around him.
“When I was younger I realised that people never know what to say to someone who is sick,” says Kerry.
This motivated him to send a text message to everyone in his contact list in the early hours of the morning only a few days after being diagnosed.
It said ‘I have stage four myeloma’ if you want to know what that means go to www.leukaemia.org.nz
“That gave people a chance to find out for themselves, so when I talked to them they were asking questions about it and felt a lot more comfortable with me.”
This willingness to share his journey led him to join Facebook with the help of his daughter Ellen, where he had the chance to connect with all of his old navy buddies.
“Every Thursday before chemo I’d draw pictures and post them on Facebook along with an update on what had happened that week. It helped people deal with what was going on. It got to the point where if I missed a post I’d be getting phone calls on Thursday night asking if everything was okay.”
After 12 weeks of chemotherapy Kerry had a stem cell transplant in February.
“My 13-year-old daughter Ellen was my rock. She used to give me my stem cell injections.”
Kerry says getting sick also made him really appreciate his family.
“When I was in hospital I used to wake up from a nap at 4pm and Ellen would be sitting there doing her homework. She’d be there for hours a day, my wife too, that was really important to me.”
By May Kerry was back at work full time and hitting the gym three times a week.
“You have to tell yourself, “I have a disease, but I’m still me”, Kerry says. “I just take things a bit slower, but I just carry on and make it known.”
Social media was a huge help for me. It helped to let people know I was ok to talk about my blood cancer and it helped them to understand it better too.
Kerry’s next challenge is to take on Lake Taupo in the 2015 Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge with 14 of his friends, family and colleagues joining him for the ride.