Licking High and Plato High have been rivals for years, but they put all that aside Tuesday night.
During warmups, each team wore shirts with “Team Eden” on the back, in honor of Eden Bisker, a 12-year-old Licking student who passed away due to leukemia in November.
“She loved the game,” said Eden’s father, Scott Bisker. “She loved to play it. She rooted for both teams. It didn’t matter if they were winning or losing, she would root them on.”
Thanks to an older sister who played, Eden quickly became a fixture around the Licking gym, though she was close to the Plato program as well. That she was there at all was a miracle.
An infection shortly after birth put Eden in the hospital in Springfield.
“She began to have seizures,” Bisker said. “She was having close to 15 seizures a day.”
The cause? A medical mystery.
“She had what they called a triple translocation of the chromosomes,” Bisker said. “They have never seen it in medical history, they have no medical documentation on it.”
After trying several seizure medications and finally settling on one that didn’t even have a prescribed children’s dose—“they were experimenting,” is what her mother Edna said—something changed, and the seizures stopped.
“She had her last seizure on her fourth birthday,” Bisker said.
She then became a normal, happy, loving girl.
“A Dallas Cowboys cheerleader on speed” is how her sister describes her.
“A force of nature” is what her mother goes with.
Either way, the next eight years were blessedly normal. Until one day in late October of 2015.
“The school called on a Thursday and said she just didn’t feel good, she just wanted to come home,” Bisker said. “I came up and picked her up.”
Thinking she had caught the flu, her family told Eden to relax, rest, and get over the illness. But it worsened.
“Sunday morning, we were up and getting ready to go to church, and she couldn’t get out of bed hardly,” Bisker said.
A trip to the Rolla urgent care turned into much, much more.
“They said, ‘No, just go straight to the ER,’” is what they told the family.
Tests at the hospital in Rolla showed Eden’s white blood cell count to be virtually zero. Forty-six minutes after walking in the door,
Eden was in a helicopter on the way to St. Louis.
“That evening of the twenty-sixth is when they told us the reason for the white blood count was she had leukemia,” Bisker said.
Twenty-three days later, Eden died.
“A tragedy like that, in a community this size, it has an effect on the entire community,” said Licking head basketball coach Ben Glasgow, who quickly got to know Eden from her time in the gym.
The Bisker’s held the event at the Licking/Plato game in part to honor Eden’s memory, and in part to raise awareness and support for pediatric cancer research.
Before the game, Scott Bisker addressed the crowd.
“Many of you know that Eden passed away nearly three months ago from complications to leukemia,” he said, voice steady but barely.
“She was only twelve years old, but she was truly an amazing person.”
