Unstoppable: How Influencer Petrina Barber Has Redefined Success While Navigating Society with Cancer and Advanced Incurable PRD
An interview with Kelly Reeves
Limitations does not mean not capable.
As a part of our “Unstoppable” series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Petrina Barber.
Petrina Barber is a fitness expert, model, and campaigner who champions inclusivity and accessibility for everyone. Her remarkable 9-year health journey is a testament to her unyielding strength, resilience, and determination to triumph over adversity. She has defied the odds through major health setbacks, including cancer and ongoing advanced incurable PRD. Petrina’s mission is to break down the stigma and stereotypes around disability and fitness, encompassing hidden disabilities, less-abled individuals, limited ability, and everyone in between. With unwavering dedication, she aims to make fitness accessible and inclusive, addressing issues such as a lack of confidence to go to the gym, beginner’s guidance, pre/post-surgery needs, and other health challenges. Petrina B Fit is the first inclusive community offering tips, advice, and guidance for everyone in need of help with gym-related matters, exercise, and fitness.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! It is really an honor. Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I received a diagnosis of advanced cervical cancer when I was 31, just five months after giving birth. Unfortunately, my symptoms were dismissed during my pregnancy. Over the next decade, I underwent extensive chemotherapy, radiation, and multiple surgeries. Although I’m now cancer-free, the radiation treatment caused irreversible damage, resulting in radiation disease affecting all the organs in my pelvic region, leading to ongoing health challenges. Then, in January 2023, I had bowel surgery, which led to the creation of a permanent stoma. I was once again told that I would have to bid farewell to going to the gym, but determined, I began working with a specialist PT and proved the experts wrong.
Now, after navigating life in a less abled body for the past nine years and realizing that fitness is not inclusive, I established The Petrina B Fit community. This community provides a safe space for individuals seeking tips, advice, encouragement, and inspiration. My goal is to help others who require guidance and support.
Do you feel comfortable sharing with us the story surrounding how you became disabled or became ill?
My cancer was treated by a combination of chemotherapy, radiation and surgeries. One of the rare side effects of the type of radiation I received is developing severe radiation damage to healthy organs. Pelvic Radiation Disease (if it occurs) can manifest in a variety of ways and to differing levels of severity and has no cure. In my case the disease continued to spread throughout my pelvis, resulting in another tumour in my bladder, which caused a massive haemorrhage leading to emergency surgery bowel obstruction, meaning I could not eat or drink and had to undergo a significant bowel resection surgery, losing half of my bowel, an ovarian cyst to form and rupture leading to life threatening sepsis. By the end of 2022 I went into kidney failure and had ascites twice. I was so weak I had to be tube fed in hospital to get my strength up. By January 2023 I underwent major surgery to remove all my remaining reproductive organs and the rest of my bowel, which is when my stoma was created.
What mental shift did you make to not let that “stop you”?
Receiving a cancer diagnosis at such a young age and realizing your life from that point onwards isn’t going to work out the way you imagined made me reframe my perspective early on. Regardless of my circumstances and all that I had lost I didn’t want to be someone that focussed on what I didn’t have and how unfair and unjust things could be. I took the cards that life had dealt me and wanted to turn them into a winning hand for me. The following years continued to be harrowing as I was constantly in an emergency medical situation with my health only declining, never improving. But I simply refused to let anything be the thing that stopped me from picking myself back up and going after the things I wanted for my life. Even when people told me no, or that things were impossible because of the state of my body and what I was left with I always knew that I would continue to try — for me.
Can you tell our readers about the accomplishments you have been able to make despite your disability or illness?
In a world of able bodies, I’ve faced many barriers to entry with my ability to access fitness and modify it in a way in which I can do with the body that I have. There is very limited consideration for less able bodies constructed into a gym space as well as limited information on how you can safely modify exercises for your body.
What advice would you give to other people who have disabilities or limitations?
Everyone has potential in them, some of us may have to look a little harder for it and we may have to work harder than others but don’t view it as a hardship or unfair. View it as your opportunity to really understand the depth of your character and capabilities and what you can actually still achieve. Success looks different to us all, don’t compare.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
Without my husband and his unwavering commitment to supporting me in every endeavour, understanding that some things were important to me but didn’t have to make sense to him and still showing up for me I would never have been able to achieve the results that I have. He and my closest friends have offered the type of support that lends you confidence when your own waivers. My friend Barry Pitts who is a PT never once doubted what I could be capable of and never treated me as anything less than capable in a gym setting. And my friend Jody Wright, a photographer who always saw the ability to create beauty & art even when I felt that the last thing my body was capable of after so long. People in their own ways give you the ability to try and see yourself through their eyes and what they see so you can continue to have faith in yourself.
I’m also grateful to all the people that I tried to get help from that turned into dead-ends or roadblocks. Everyone that told me things wouldn’t be possible. All these people forced me to look for my own solutions harder and made me more determined along the way.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
I will continue to bring together a community to empower, support, and offer guidance to individuals, whether they are beginning their fitness journey, have been inactive for a while, are pre/post-surgery, or face various health issues. Fitness should be inclusive, and I’m here to ensure that it is.
Can you share “5 things I wish people understood or knew about people with physical limitations” and why.
1. Disabled has no “look” you can’t’ judge someone based off what you see.
2. We have to work 100 times harder than an able body to just make it through a day because the world is not set up or adapted to accommodate people with limitations.
3. What you consider to be a simple task, just as accepting or declining a lunch invitation, can be a huge process both in mental planning and decision making as well as physical ramifications.
4. Limitations does not mean not capable.
5. If you’ve met one person in a less able body you’ve met one person. Everyone is different. There is no rule in how people can operate or behave based on their bodies. What’s possible for one person with the same disease may not be possible for another.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”?
Reputation is what others think of you. Character is who you actually are.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this 🙂
David Goggins — what he’s accomplished is extraordinary, but I very much doubt he would have time to eat with me. But I would LOVE to train with him in a heartbeat. I wouldn’t even suggest getting food to him. It would be to train.
Joe Rogan.
Arnold Schwarzenegger would be truly fascinating.
Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview. We wish you continued success and good health!
Photo credit to: Jody Wright Photography
Unstoppable: How Influencer Petrina Barber Has Redefined Success While Navigating Society with… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.