499 beads

Lisa Dick

My son and I stand on the corner of Frederick and Great King Streets in Dunedin. He is wearing seven strings of beads around his neck and holding a blue collection bucket. His necklace is so heavy it makes his neck ache, so he didn’t put it on until we reached our designated spot. The hospital looms above us, blotting light from the pavement below. But, here on our corner, the sun shines.

At 12 years old, my son is confident. He catches two buses to school each day. He’s a house captain. He plays football, futsal, water polo, underwater hockey and field hockey. He learns guitar and drums. He has a dramatic streak that appears when he, his siblings and their cousins put on family shows in the summer. He’s getting tall. His brown hair needs a cut, and his collection of Lynx deodorants clutters up our bathroom drawer. He’s fit, he’s healthy and he’s active.

But that heavy necklace he is wearing tells those walking past that he wasn’t always this way. 499 beads are threaded on those seven strands. He earned them, bead by bead, between the ages of six and nine, during the two-and-a-half years he had leukaemia.

He shakes the bucket enthusiastically at passersby but leaves me to do the asking. ‘Hi there,’ I say to people with a (sometimes forced) smile. ‘Would you like to support the Child Cancer Foundation?’

The Beads of Courage programme is run in Aotearoa New Zealand by the Child Cancer Foundation. It was first piloted at Phoenix Children’s Hospital in the US in 2003 and now runs in nine countries around the world. It was created by Jean Gribbon, a nurse working in paediatric oncology who wanted to give children something permanent to mark their cancer journey. Different coloured beads are assigned to different treatments or experiences. Presented matter-of-factly on an A4 printout, they make for grim reading, especially when your child is a collector and wants one of every colour. ‘Oh, a glow in the dark one! What do I have to do to get that?’ ‘A course of radiation.’ ‘What’s a dark green one for?’ “A stem cell harvest.’ Please, no.

Four years post-cancer, my son’s necklace is a physical reminder of each treatment he endured. The days and nights spent in hospital. The hours on chemo drips. The minutes in waiting rooms. The seconds with eyes squeezed shut while needles were inserted. It is also a reminder of the work the parent of sick child does. Cancer parents keep track of the appointment schedule. We learn the names and side effects of all the medicines. We don gloves each morning to protect ourselves from the pills our sweet children must swallow. We get to know the fleet of doctors and nurses in the clinics and wards, and we do the talking when our child can’t or won’t. Like expectant parents as their due date draws closer, we have packed hospital bags ready to go. We know which ready meals are easiest to heat in tiny ward kitchens. But the most important work we do is keeping our child’s spirits up through hard days and nights. His beads are a touchstone to those memories.

The first bead on the necklace is a hand-carved pounamu bead gifted by Ngāi Tahu. The last is a purple heart. The 497 other beads tell what happened in between. There are beads spelling out his name. Cancer taught him his full name, and his birth date and year.  He had to recite them many times.

Three of his 37 yellow ‘night in hospital’ beads remind me of the time staff let his two older sisters have a three-night sleepover in the ward. Three nights of pop quizzes for the nurses, blue gloves turned into balloons, strawberry milkshakes and breakfasts in bed.

One of his nine red ‘blood transfusion’ beads makes me think of the kind person in Christchurch who took time out from last-minute present shopping and Christmas organising to give blood on Christmas Eve. Blood is labelled with the location and date of donation and this one, which my son received when his haemoglobin levels dipped a few days after Christmas in 2020, felt particularly poignant.

Amongst his 47 white ‘chemotherapy’ beads is one signifying the first dose. It disappears into the laden necklace, but not from my memory. The sickening, disbelieving, and simultaneously anticlimactic feeling of watching the chemo drip into my son for the first time. Later, it became completely normal. Lunchboxes, tick; drop kids at school, tick; take son for chemo, tick.

His two face beads represent hair loss. The first time, when my son’s hair became so wispy that he relented and let us shave the rest, his younger brother (then just three) got upset.  ‘Do me! Do me!’ he started yelling when he saw his brother’s bald head. ‘Really?’ we double, triple, quadruple checked. ‘Once it’s shaved, we can’t put it back on.’ He insisted. When the two snuggled close, it was like having two smooth-headed babies again.

At the corner of Frederick and Great King Streets in 2026 our collection bucket slowly fills. This is not the easiest location. Pedestrians rush to beat the lights – either getting trapped by the red man, studiously staring at their phones and avoiding our eyes for a few awkward minutes, or racing past to beat the illuminated countdown. One man turns us down, then sheepishly returns, telling us he ‘got an attack of the guilts’. One student tells us he can’t even afford food. Many people explain politely that they don’t carry cash but still don’t give when we point out the QR code for card donation. A few say they’ll be back with money. Some do return.

After two hours, a collection supervisor comes to retrieve the bucket. They thank us for our time. My son takes off his necklace and stows it back in his bag.

We step back into our normal life. The one we once feared was over.

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Lisa Dick is a journalist and editor, who has worked across print, radio and TV news in Aotearoa New Zealand. Alongside her current role as the University of Otago’s Publications Editor, she is completing a graduate diploma in English at the University. She has five children, one of whom was diagnosed with leukaemia in August 2020. Her first picture book, The Baby Sleeps, will be released by Allen & Unwin in July 2026.