Five years

I’m not sure if he’s still there, but I found this picture on a Monday five years ago as I entered Sahlgrenska hospital for the worst week of my life. In between the kind faces of Emma, Frida, Annika and the other miracle workers at the oncology department, I saw a picture of Dr McDreamy hanging on the wall. Hospital humour.

The week itself was much less humorous. I spent it hooked up to bag after bag of toxins, mixed up with a saline water drip, for five days in a row, around nine hours a day. My hands and veins got sore from the needles and the constant pumping of liquids through my system, and the toxins hammered away at my body at an ever increasing rate.

By Friday, I felt worse than ever before. It’s impossible to explain to someone who has never experienced it, but it was horrendous, despite the tireless care of the criminally underpaid nurses. That night, I could go home — I still don’t know how I made it to the car and into our apartment. While I was bathing in sweat and dreaming the weirdest fever dreams, Paris happened.

The next three weeks were terrible. The worst thing was not even my very limited appetite or the fact that I lost ALL my hair, but that I lost the will to do anything at all. Read, watch TV, sleep: I was empty inside, a hollow vessel instead of my usual self that is full of ideas and thoughts and life. It’s the scariest thing I have ever felt, and thinking about it, even now, makes me nauseous.

And then, just as I wondered whether this would ever change, the tide turned. I regained my energy and my will to exist, and a few weeks later I even found the energy to go to the company Christmas party. I believe I even saw the clock strike midnight as I cautiously had some light beers and spent quality time with colleagues. I was back to just living.

Yesterday, I had the last ever phone call with my oncologist. We discussed my last ever X-ray and blood samples, which looked just fine. And she wished me good luck. With everything. As of today, I am a cancer patient no more.