Bryony Smith and her dog Rosie. Bryony has a Stage 2 brain tumour and is fundraising for brain tumour awareness week. Photo / Alex Cairns
Bryony Smith and her dog Rosie. Bryony has a Stage 2 brain tumour and is fundraising for brain tumour awareness week. Photo / Alex Cairns
The Bay of Plenty Times is looking back at the stories of 2023. Here’s what made headlines in November.
November 9
A Bay of Plenty mother who could “barely walk” and spent up to 18 hours a day in bed while suffering from Long Covid was hospitalised for seven weeks after her lungs “collapsed”.
And a Rotorua mother with :ong Covid has not worked fulltime in 14 months because of the post-viral condition, saying it “completely changes” her ability to participate in life.
It comes as an epidemiologist says Long Covid is “very severe and disabling” for some people and it is worth minimising the number of times people catch Covid-19.
Bay of Plenty mother of three Irene Simmons spent seven weeks in hospital after getting Covid-19.
November 13
When strangers started turning up on the doorstep last December asking for their Facebook purchases, Cheryl Bond’s mother-in-law was confused — she was not selling anything.
Little did she know, a scammer from Canada was posing online as a New Zealander living at her Rotorua address.
Bond, from Tauranga, did some digging. She found the Facebook profile had American-type products for sale, including “a snowmobile — in Rotorua”, plus big bouncy castles and appliances with prices “too good to be true.”
“I raised awareness of it on three Rotorua-based community boards and asked people to privately message me if it was my mother-in-law’s address.
“From there, I was able to track the profile and find that she was from Canada [and had] a New Zealand bank account.”
Cheryl Bond discovered a scammer in Canada was using her mother-in-law's home address in Rotorua to trick buyers. Photo / Alex Cairns
November 17
A congestion-busting idea to toll many of Tauranga’s main arterial routes has been labelled “ludicrous” and “unfair” by people who could be forced to pay more to drive to the supermarket.
Others worry it would push the cost of living higher and one business owner says it might prompt him to move.
In one scenario of how a variable road-pricing idea being considered by Tauranga City Council might work, commuting between the CBD and Pāpāmoa during peak hours for five days a week could cost more than $2400 a year.
In a matter of days, Tauranga teacher Bryony Smith, 29, went from falling at hockey practice to being told she had a brain tumour.
“My world changed overnight.”
Within months, specialists flown in from Australia and a neurosurgeon were operating on her brain, and then she was relearning how to speak and use the limbs on her right side.
Now she’s joining other brain tumour and cancer patients, their loved ones and advocates in a fight for better funding, treatment, care and research.
Brain cancer kills about 278 people every year in New Zealand, with about 18 of those in the Bay of Plenty.
Bryony Smith and her dog Rosie. Bryony has a Stage 2 brain tumour and is fundraising for brain tumour awareness week. Photo / Alex Cairns
November 25
A woman who discovered a natural bee colony in Tauranga filled with expanding construction foam is disgusted at what she describes as the “murder of thousands of bees”.
The colony had taken up residence in a Tauranga City Council tree on Regent St, Brookfield.
The hive had been there for years and had “never been a problem”, the woman said.
A former beekeeper described the attack as “heartbreaking” and “cruel and disgusting”.
The council was not aware of the attack and has said anyone concerned about bees on council land should contact it. It was unclear who carried out the attack.
