Stress busting

A cancer diagnosis at 26 forced Nick Petrie to learn ways to manage his anxiety that he’s now applying to reduce workplace burnout.

- BY RUTH BROWN

Lying in hospital after cancer treatment, Nick Petrie was listening to a man in the next bed complaining about not having a whole new outlook on life, with newfound wisdom and gratitude, after getting cancer. “I just feel the same way I used to,” the fellow complained.

For Petrie, too, everything felt the same. But the moment galvanised him into action. He realised change didn’t happen automatically and in his case, only he could do something about it. Otherwise, he would remain in constant angst about cancer and dying.

It was his second bout of cancer. Tumours had appeared in his liver following an initial diagnosis, at 26, of cancer in his abdomen, so the outlook for the young rugby player was bleak. Christchurch-born and with a double degree in commerce and physical education from the University of Otago, Petrie had been playing rugby in Japan when headaches forced him home at the end of the season. Admitted to hospital, surgeons found three large tumours that led to the removal of his stomach, spleen and part of his pancreas. He had gastrointestinal stromal tumours – a very rare gastrointestinal cancer.

He went back to playing rugby. Within a year, cancer had got to his liver. The tumours were treated but likely to grow back.

In his hospital bed, Petrie tells the Listener, he thought about transforming his life: “I researched: what do the people [with cancer] who live the longest do? Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, they made changes. I just looked at all the practices they did and thought, ‘I’m just going to do them all.’”

A year or two later, he learnt of psychologist and neuroscience researcher Derek Roger, whose team at the University of York in England had been studying the question of why, when two people face the same situation in life, one might get stressed out and the other remains resilient.