Popular Hollywood actor Dolph Lundgren has opened up on his secret battle with lung cancer which he has been contending with for the past eight years.
The Swedish actor opened up about his battle on ‘In Depth with Graham Besinger’ speculated whether his past use of steroids for bodybuilding is to blame for his condition.
65-year-old Lundgren who revealed he was first diagnosed with lung cancer as far back as 2015 said that he went into remission but then the cancer returned in the year 2020, and was told he had 2-3 years left to live by one of his doctors.
“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,” the actor said.
“Then I did scans every six months. Then you do it every year and it was fine for five years,” explained Lundgren. “In 2020, I was back in Sweden and had some kind of acid reflux… So I did an MRI, and they found that there were a few more tumors around that area.”
After he underwent surgery, during which six tumors were removed, Lundgren recalled: “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.'”
He added that he had to undergo systemic therapy to contain the condition; “But then I started getting these side effects where I got diarrhea, and so I lost a lot of weight.”
“And that wasn’t very nice for myself for you know, my poor fiancée [Emma Krokdal,] who suffered through that,” Lundgren added.
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He continued; “The problem was that the doctor over there (Cedars) wasn’t really sharing information with us. We didn’t really know didn’t know what was going on.”
“I didn’t hear from the people at Cedars for six months. They never called me or anything,” he continued. “I think now, thinking back, they probably thought, ‘Oh, I’m a lost case.'”
Lundgren said the doctor “started saying things like, ‘You should probably take a break and spend more time with your family and so forth.'”
“So I kind of asked him, ‘How long do you think I got left?’ I think he said two or three years, but I could tell in his voice that he probably thought it was less,” the action star revealed.
“I thought it was it for sure,” Lundgren shared. “You kind of look at your life and go like, ‘I’ve had a great life.’ I’ve had a freaking 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,” he explained. “It was just like [I] feel sorry for my kids and my fiancée and the people around you because I’m still a fairly young guy and fairly active.” Lundgren said.
