Hika tackles the Big C

Former All Black hooker Hika Reid at Rotorua stadium. Picture / Kelvin Teixeira

Suggest to Hika Reid that it's about time a story was written about him and he shoots back that it sounds scarily like an obituary.

Reassured that this is far from the case, that we just want to chat with one of the best All Blacks Rotorua has produced, he relents.

But in the light of his recent brush with bone-marrow cancer it transpires Reid spends much more time talking frankly about his illness and his will to conquer it than he does about the life and times of Hika the Hooker from Ngongotaha.

Diagnosed only weeks ago with hairy cell leukaemia, a rare form of the disease, he is back home, sharing his Waikato Hospital specialist's view it is very beatable - 80 per cent of those who have it go into remission after their first treatment.

"Will I ever be 100 per cent again? I don't know, I have never had this thing before, but at a good age (47) and being relatively fit, that helps".

So, too, does Reid's unbridled determination to tackle his medical setback with the same determination he employed in his rugby career.

He spent his week of intensive chemotherapy walking around the ward "hooked up to this contraption like a coathanger".

Woken at 5am by nurses, he made a habit of getting up and pacing 10 lengths of the hospital ward's 253m corridor - equal to 2.5km a day.

Once free of the "coathanger" it was back to his room to lift light weights, a Swiss ball workout and boxing exercises "for an hour max - I didn't want to exhaust myself. When I was boxing I would visualise I was whacking the bad white blood cells, using fighting techniques to ward off the pest, as I call it."

Reid's daily workout done, it was on with his track gear, "shorts, whatever" and out of bed until nightfall. "That kept me in the positive frame of mind I needed."

He found inspiration in cyclist Lance Armstrong's book It's Not About The Bike, written after he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Armstrong won six consecutive Tour de France titles from 1994.

Reid tolerated his chemotherapy well. Unlike some he did not lose his hair. Ironically, he had his head shaved two years ago in a Chiefs Child Cancer promotion.

It is with some pride he says he is still having to shave it every second morning.

One thing the energetic Reid did find hard during his hospital stay was being confined to barracks - going outside his ward could have risked infection.

"It was like I was being wrapped in cotton wool. I had to wear this face mask to keep out any germs."

Now on the "outside", the mask remains around his neck - there in case he comes into contact with someone with the sniffles.

It's had its uses: one of his children has had flu since he's been home.

One benefit of his hospital stay has been a 10kg weight loss following a planned eating regime and drinking a "hell of a lot of water - it flushes out the chemo poisons that go in and I feel great for it".

Not an overtly religious man, Reid ponders whether there may have been some God-given reason why life has taken him down the leukaemia path.

"If anything, it has given me the message this is not the end of the world, although that is certainly what I thought at the beginning. It was a rare strain [of leukaemia], it was aggressive and throughout my bone marrow.

"If you are going through adversity it is all about finding the positives. I was told that with a positive frame of mind you can beat this. I have been given the treatment, my body has responded sufficiently for me to leave hospital.

"I am now into unknown territory. If the body doesn't kick in I will go back for more chemo ... but I'm not going to lie down for this bugger. I am just going to keep on rocking."

- DAILY POST (ROTORUA)