Rugby hero Hika hooked on life

Suggest to Hika Reid that it is about time a profile story is written about him and he shoots back that it sounds scarily like an obituary.
Assured this is far from the case, that we just felt like "bit of a 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 Hika spends much more time talking frankly of his illness and his will to conquer it than he does about the life and times of Hika the Hooker from Ngongotaha.
Diagnosed only a matter of weeks ago with hairy cell leukaemia, a rare form of the disease, he is already 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 Hika's unbridled determination to tackle his medical setback with the same psychological determination he has employed throughout his rugby career. He spent his week of intensive chemotherapy treatment time walking around the ward "hooked up to this contraption like a coathanger".
Woken at 5am by nurses doing observations he made a habit of getting up and pacing 10 lengths of the hospital ward's 253m corridor - equating to 2.5km a day.
Once free of the "coathanger" shackle it was back to his room to lift light weights, a Swiss ball workout and boxing exercises "for an hour, an hour-10 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. I've done a lot of boxing with [Rotorua Commonwealth Games boxer] Mike Sykes."
Hika'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 subsequently went on to win the Tour de France in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
Throughout his hospital stay Hika did a lot of singing and humming of One Day at a Time, a song from his rugby trip days.
He tolerated his chemotherapy well. Unlike some, it did not send him bald. 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 Hika did find hard during his hospital stay was being confined to barracks. Going outside his ward could easily have courted infection.
"It was like I was a 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, hidden below his sweatshirt - there in case he comes into contact with someone with a dose of the sniffles. It's had its uses. One of his kids has had flu since he's been home.
One benefit from his hospital stay has been a 10kg weight loss, following the introduction of a planned eating regime, coupled with 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, Hika ponders that 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 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. It's just the way it has to be done but I'm not going to lie down for this bugger. I am just going to keep on rocking."