Nigel Latta on true love and life since his terminal cancer diagnosis

Eight months ago Nigel Latta was told he had incurable stomach cancer. Since then New Zealand's best known psychologist has been doing everything he can to stay alive for as long as possible. He and wife Natalie Flynn tell Gill Higgins about the day their life changed and the promise Nigel made Natalie.

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“I made Natalie a promise, that I'm not going to leave."

Nigel Latta can’t hide his emotion as he tells me how his wife, Natalie Flynn, is his reason to live. At the time of his shock diagnosis, they’d only been married for six months.

“This is always the stuff that gets me." He takes a moment to fight back his tears. “It’s like I can think about dying, dying doesn't scare me because I just think I've been asleep. That wasn't scary. Death is the same thing. But it's leaving Natalie alone. That's the thing that always affects me the most."

Nigel and Natalie are sitting with me in their Mount Eden kitchen. They’re holding hands. I notice Nigel grips hers more tightly as he continues.

“So I'm when I don't feel like going for a walk, when it's raining, I tell myself to get out of bed and go for a damn walk. She’s been the single thing that I think has been a large part of keeping me alive thus far and will keep me alive for years to come."

He turns to look directly into Natalie’s eyes. “I’ve got a really good reason. I've made a promise. I'm not going to leave."

It was way back in September last year when I first contacted Nigel Latta. I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about sharing his cancer experience. Would he, understandably, want to keep it private? Or would he see it as an opportunity to share what he’s learnt? It turns out that, even at this incredibly difficult time, the clinical psychologist who became a household name for his books and TV shows sees the power of advice and feels a desire to share it. And what could be more helpful than advice on matters of life and death?

One caveat though with regards to timing, “maybe we can do it a bit further down the line” he suggested. He’d just started another round of chemotherapy, and he knew the immense toll it could take. Nausea, tiredness, lack of energy. He was right.

In fact, the delay was so long I thought perhaps he’d changed his mind. But no, after the several months of chemo he was ready to go. He explained he’d “hit a bit of a big old pothole”. He describes the downtimes as "snakes", in a life that's a game of snakes and ladders.

Luckily, at the end of January, a ladder presented itself. His treatments were working, his strength was building and he was eager for us to meet. So I arrived with the sun shining, bearing coffees for his wife and our cameramen. And it seemed the presence of the cameras put a spring in Nigel's step. After all, filming has been a part of his life for 16 years. Starting with the criminal behaviour series Beyond the Darklands, he then added several critically-acclaimed “Politically Incorrect” guides. It made him the go-to clinical psychologist for just about every media outlet. And quite right too, as we saw that day, he’s an absolute natural. A real pro at being himself when the cameras are switched on. And he loves giving advice.

Natalie is also a clinical psychologist but, unlike Nigel, this is her first time talking on TV and she’s a a bit nervous. Nigel constantly reassures her, helping her with her microphone and telling her she’ll be great. They hold hands constantly. The love between them is palpable.

“It's something that we're really lucky about,” Natalie says. “We're in love. And so, we don't have to deal with any feelings of guilt that maybe we should have treated each other a certain way. And so the advice that I'd give to everybody is that if you love someone, just make the relationship good.” She doesn’t say ‘because you never know what might happen’, but it's inferred.

It was May last year. Natalie was in the kitchen, singing – “I'm quite tone deaf” – but she was happy, thinking to herself “the kids are all doing well and I was looking forward to the day, because I was picking Nigel up from having a peptic ulcer appointment, and we were going to go for dinner to celebrate being married for six months”.

The celebration dinner never happened, because it turned out that Nigel’s problem wasn’t a peptic ulcer.

“I got this endoscopy,” Nigel explains. "And then we were just sitting chatting." They were enjoying cups of tea with no idea their lives were about to change when the nurse came in. “This is when it went bad." The nurse said the doctor would be in to talk about the results and that Nigel would be having an emergency CT scan is the afternoon. “Immediately, with my Sherlock Holmes-like skill I thought hang on, I like the first bit, I'm cool with that, but what the hell's going on with the second bit?”

Nigel was told it looked like he had some form of cancer but they needed to be sure. After the CT scan, the doctor was sure. It was stomach cancer. It had spread and it was incurable.

Nigel and Natalie pressed the doctor to give them an idea of how long Nigel had to live. Doctors are always reluctant to estimate that because it’s not an exact science. “But we said, look, we're psychologists, we can handle it. Come on, what's the number? And then he says, six to twelve months. And that's when everything unplugged," says Nigel.

Natalie couldn’t believe it was real. She says she was frightened.

Their clinically trained minds have tried to understand it since, but it's not easy. “Brains just don’t work like that,” Nigel says. "When you get this big number, it's like your brain just goes ‘OK, I'm just going to need to unplug for a little bit and process this."

So that’s what they did. They knew they had to tell their five children, two from Nigel’s first marriage, three from Natalie’s. But after years of advising people on resilience and being straight up, neither of them felt prepared. It was a shock. Natalie admits that, after all the decades of psychology, she was still at a loss for what to do.

“That would probably be the first time in my life when I properly went into shock," she says. "So it was really helpful to know that shock comes to an end, otherwise I would have thought I was losing my mind. So I knew that it would go and that we needed some time for that intense shock to lift."

They checked into a hotel to prepare themselves for what lay ahead.

“We wanted to be in an emotional state that we could be there for our children as we always are, and we knew that we had to catch our breath to do that”.

They cried a lot. They ate a lot of ice cream. They cried some more. And then they made a plan.

The next day they went home and broke the news. Over the next few days, as it sunk in, there were more tears, and they ate more ice cream. “Yes," says Nigel. "There was a lot of ice cream eating, there still is, I have diet of a nine-year-old boy who's allowed to go to a supermarket and get whatever he wants, that's awesome.”

“Nigel just makes everyone around him feel so good, and that optimism is contagious. He makes it so easy for me to love and care for him”.

Nigel believes optimism does more than that. He and Natalie tell me about research that suggests an optimistic attitude makes your immune cells more active. It’s one of the things Nigel feels he can control. There are other things too. His diet (it's not all icecream) doing exercise and being open to all that his oncology team advise him to do. It’s total trust in science because that’s how Nigel rolls. “So a lot of people go off and research all about the tumour and the drugs, and maybe that's good for those people, but I just figure I've got all these really clever people who are working really hard, so I’m going to leave them to that."

He lets the experts tell him where to be and what to do and he does it, and he’s made some incredible progress.

His initial chemotherapy presented a huge 'ladder’ with much of the spread of cancer regressing. But then he hit a snake, an occasional cough suggested the cancer might have spread to his lungs. And it had. It meant his course of radiotherapy had to stop. But thankfully the game continued, and another ladder came his way. His genetic profile meant there was another drug that could help. He’s now taking it, and it appears to be working well. If it hadn’t, his doctor said he could have been dead within four weeks.

“When he said four weeks, we were dreaming about the good old days of six to twelve months,” says Natalie.

But four weeks came and went and Nigel is doing well. “So we're hoping it's years again," says Natalie.

Nigel believes it can be. “I just got an email this morning from this lovely man from Timaru, who said that he was given 18 months to live 12 years ago. So, there is this long tail, and I think, I'm young, I'm not fit but I'm not unfit, and I'm doing all the things that I can. And we've got some pretty amazing and wonderful drugs going in right now."

And he’s got his reason to live. His wife, his children, his dogs, his passion for giving advice. The miracle, he says, of sitting next to the one he loves and feeling the touch of her hand.

“We have this illusion that life will go on forever, so the joy gets buried in all the everyday stuff. What we've learned is, and I wish I'd done this earlier in my life, connect with the joy earlier. Don't wait for the catastrophe.”