Forty-seven-year-old Maraetai resident Brent Curreen has potentially had the hardest 10 year stretch of any parent yet continues to fight to spend more time with his son.
Curreen’s son Nevin knows far more about cancer than any nine-year-old kid should, but he too had a rough start to life.
Nevin was born with a large hole in his heart and a cranial condition called trigonocephaly where the forehead takes on a triangle shape and by the time he was five years old, he’d had two 12-hour surgeries on both his head and heart.
The Curreens had to be placed in home-based isolation for three years due to Nevin’s weakened immune system, preventing him from interacting with other children because of the germs they might transmit.
In 2016, the Curreens thought they were in the clear, with Nevin being given the green light to be a normal kid, until Brent heard the devastating news.
Curreen was first diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2017, which was picked up through an ulcer that wouldn’t go away.
“It was quite ironic really because his [Nevin’s] journey had ended and mine was just beginning,” says Curreen.
Curreen’s stomach cancer was treated in August 2017 with chemotherapy and surgery, where they cut out most of his stomach.
“My stomach is only about the size of a tennis ball now which makes eating a little difficult sometimes,” says Curreen.
After surgery, Curreen’s stomach began to leak, which left him bedridden for a month with tubes coming out of him collecting the fluid.
While in remission, Curreen and his ex-partner went through a relationship break-up and decided that they would co-parent their son Nevin.
“It was looking good for a while and we were about to go to court to finalise the custody documents, until it came back,” says Curreen.
Curreen was told that his cancer had metastasized and had grown on his lungs and an aggressive tumour had formed on his adrenal gland, which is when he was told his cancer was terminal.
“When Nevin’s mother and I sat down to talk about what we wanted, we basically just agreed that it wasn’t worth the fight and that Nevin would come and live with me until I couldn’t support him any longer,” Curreen says.
To add to Curreen’s hardships of being a sole caregiver for his son, he was made redundant from his job, forcing him to depend on a sickness benefit to cover treatments.
After suffering migraines and loss of vision just before Christmas in 2021, Curreen was rushed to A&E to get CT scans, which showed a tumor pressing on his optical nerve.
He received an operation on New Year’s Eve of 2021 to remove the tumour.
“I’ve lost all my vision in certain areas on both of my eyes because of the nerve damage,” says Curreen.
The tumor returned in June this year and Curreen was told he only had a matter of months to live, yet he has continued to fight.
“Some days just getting in and out of a chair or walking around the house seems like a gym workout but I plod along, one foot in front of the other, because that’s what I have to do, just keep going on,” says Curreen.
Every three weeks, Curreen attends a non-funded immunotherapy treatment session called Keytruda on Auckland’s North Shore which costs roughly $100,000 annually.
Due to his loss of vision, Curreen is unable to drive anymore meaning he has to take public transport to go to cancer treatments.
“It can get quite costly because we live so far away from the treatment and there is sometimes more than one trip a week. Last week I spent around $300 on uber for one return trip to the city,” says Curreen.
Curreen’s family live in Northland and the Hawkes Bay areas, meaning they are very rarely around to help with transport.
Although grateful for all the donations Curreen has received on his Givealittle page, which is almost at $9000, he says that it unfortunately doesn’t even scratch the surface of covering transport and treatment costs.
Curreen says that Nevin is what gets him out of bed every day.
“As long as I have enough energy to get him to school in the mornings and sort him out in the afternoons and evenings, I know I’m doing all I can,” he says.
To donate to Curren’s Givealittle page, visit https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-brent-have-more-time-with-his-son
