Above: Hannah (center) with her two coaches Ann Brumbaugh (left) and Ben Shroats (right) after competing in her first competition since starting chemotherapy.
By Abby Farrell
Like many other people who live in Texas, Ashlei Bisharah was on the lookout for ways for her daughters London Bisharah and Hannah Bisharah to stay active indoors during the hot summer months.
As a result, she signed them up for skating lessons with the Dallas Figure Skating Club.
“Both of my girls took to the ice really well,” Ashlei Bisharah said. “I was like, ‘Hmm, we might have something here,’ and they enjoyed it.”
Hannah Bisharah, the younger of the siblings who is now 10 years old, quickly fell in love with the sport and was drawn to, as she said, “the jumps, and the spins and the pretty dresses.”
But in the spring of 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Hannah Bisharah was only 7 years old, Ashlei Bisharah started noticing her daughter was getting tired more often and had lost interest in participating in off-ice training sessions with her coaches over Zoom, which was unusual for a kid like Hannah Bisharah who was highly motivated to skate.
“Hannah pushes herself. She motivates herself, and she did not want to do off-ice on Zoom,” Ashlei Bisharah said. “It was happening a little more frequently and we thought she was just not interested because she's not there in person.”
But over the next couple of weeks, Hannah Bisharah would start to experience night sweats and a fever that would come and go. Nobody thought much of it, until one morning, in May of 2020, when she woke up with swollen lymph nodes. It was at that point that her parents decided to take her in to see a doctor.
The diagnosis: acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Hannah Bisharah was admitted to the hospital for a week and needed immediate blood and platelet transfusions. She was also set on a 2 ½-year treatment plan, which consisted of weekly doses of IV and oral chemotherapy.
At first, Hannah Bisharah’s body wasn’t responding to the chemo, so by the end of the 2 ½ years, Hannah Bisharah had gone through two times more chemo than the average leukemia patient.
“I’ve known adults with cancer, but I’ve never heard of a 2 ½ year treatment, so that was very shocking to us,” Ashlei Bisharah said. “Two and a half years is so long, and it started immediately. She’s probably had 28 spinal taps, and blood transfusions, platelet transfusions, antibody transfusions – just tons of things.”
Because of the ongoing pandemic and her treatment, Hannah Bisharah wasn’t able to skate for more than 1 ½ years.
“She would see her sister come in from the rink when she would go, and just seeing her come in with her skate bag and her skate clothes on, Hannah would say she missed [skating],” Ashlei Bisharah said. “But she would never get down about it. She always knew she was going to be skating again.”
In October of 2021, while Hannah Bisharah was still going in for weekly chemo, she went in for routine tests which came back with optimistic results, and it was then that her oncologist asked her the one question she had been waiting to hear for so long: “Do you want to go skating today?”
Hannah Bisharah didn’t want to waste any time, so Ashlei Bisharah called one of her coaches, Ben Shroats, and asked if he would be interested in giving Hannah Bisharah a lesson that day. Without hesitation, Shroats jumped in his car and drove 30 minutes to give Hannah Bisharah the lesson.
Her first lesson since before starting chemo was nerve-wracking for everyone because not only was this Hannah Bisharah’s first time skating in 1 ½-years, but they had to be extra careful because if her platelets dropped and she cut herself, she was at very high risk of losing too much blood.
“[Shroats] gave her a lesson that day, and she skated for two hours,” Asheli Bisharah said. “I think it was just the adrenaline and she was so excited. [Shroats] was very protective of her.”
In typical Hannah Bisharah fashion, she wasn’t satisfied with just starting lessons again. She wanted to compete.
Despite the setback of having to withdraw from her first scheduled competition in November of 2021, Hannah Bisharah took the ice at the 2022 Love Bug Open in January of the following year, where she placed fifth. Two months later, she competed at the 2022 Skate Austin Bluebonnet Open and won gold.
“We were so proud of her. We told her the fact that she’s even getting on the ice is amazing,” Ashlei Bisharah said.
Getting Hannah Bisharah back on the ice took the village of her family and her coaches. At one point, after rinks opened back up, Hannah Bisharah’s older sister London Bisharah made the sacrifice to step back from skating because the risk of bringing an illness back home and getting Hannah Bisharah sick was too high. Her coaches, Shroats and Ann Lewis, were incredibly supportive of the entire Bisharah family and would give London Bisharah rides to and from the rink if Ashlei Bisharah was with Hannah Bisharah at the hospital.
As Hannah Bisharah continues to skate, some of her nurses from when she was in treatment have even come to watch her compete in local competitions.
“Hannah has such a good relationship with both of her coaches, and I can't imagine us going through this without her coaches,” Ashlei Bisharah said of Shroats and Lewis.
Recently, Hannah Bisharah added a new award to the shelves in her bedroom by passing her preliminary test. As she showed off her patch, she beamed, proud of the important milestone in her skating career.
For Hannah Bisharah, the hardest part about going through treatment wasn’t the weekly doctor’s visits, or constantly getting IVs, but not being able to skate and knowing that she wasn’t progressing in the sport like others who started at the same time she had. Specifically, if she hadn’t had to take a break from skating for chemotherapy, she was hoping to have landed her Axel by now like some of her peers.
Her goals for this season are just that – to land the jump she has now set her sights on since before her diagnosis.
Outside of the rink, Hannah Bisharah is now in remission and celebrated one year since her last chemo treatment in October of 2023, which was notable because she was at a high risk of relapsing.
In addition, because of her positive experiences with the doctors and nurses who took care of her during treatment, the now fifth grader wants to become a pediatric hematology oncology nurse when she is older.
“Hannah is a very strong-willed child and always has been,” Ashlei Bisharah said. “She knows what she wants. She wasn’t going to let cancer take skating away from her.”
