Dolph Lundgren is opening up about his secret diagnosis with kidney cancer, which he has been battling for the past eight years.
“This is just the first time I’ve spoken about it. So if you can save one person’s life who was in my situation then it’s worth it, for sure,” he told Graham Bensinger.
At the time of his initial diagnosis in 2015, doctors performed surgery to take a tumor off of his kidney, but found five others on various organs.
“They took out that one tumor,” Lundgren said. “Then they took the other two they found, and another three small ones they found. So, six altogether. Hopefully, it’s cleaned out.”
After that surgery, they found that there was an inoperably large tumor, which would require shrinking before removal.
“There’s a picture that I was going to direct and star in that was starting in the fall. The doctor called me when I was in Alabama ready to shoot and said, ‘They found one more tumor in the liver.'”
“At that point, it started to hit me that this is kind of something serious,” he continued. “They did a scan to prepare for surgery. And the surgeon called me and said, ‘No, it’s grown now. It’s too big. We can’t take it out. It’s like the size of a small lemon.'”
“So, I kinda asked him, ‘How long do you think I have left?’ and I think he said, ‘Two or three years,’ but I could tell in his voice that he probably thought it was less.”
Despite Lundgren’s prognosis, he is beating the odds, surviving far past what the physicians’ estimates.
“I thought it was it, for sure. You kind of look at your life and go, ‘I’ve had a frickin’ great life.’ I’ve lived like five lifetimes in one already, with everything I’ve done. So, it wasn’t like I was bitter about it.”
We wish Lundgren and his family all the best.
Sources:
Dolph Lundgren Has Been Privately Battling Cancer for 8 Years (people.com)
https://www.insider.com/dolph-lundgren-cancer-8-years-tumor-kidney-liver-2023-5
