Annus horribilis

My terrible year didn't actually last a full year, but it still felt like an eternity. Summarized for those who only wants to know the essentials:

In September 2025 I got the diagnosis, "metastatic cancer", and as of now, about 11 months later, after receiving a lot of treatments, I've been cancer free for a couple of weeks.

That sums up the entire situation, the rest of this text includes more details, some of which can be distressing.

Summer of 2025

I started noticing that something was off during the summer of 2025, I felt kind of unwell and tired over a long period of time, and my body didn't function as expected without any obvious reason for that. After a bit of time I decided to see my general practitioner, even though I didn't really feel sick.

After listening to my vague descriptions of the situation he recognized some pattern and prescribed a series of more or less invasive tests. After these I was scheduled for a meeting with Gastrokirurgisk poliklinikk at Ullevål, where one of the doctors there would explain the results they had gathered from these tests.

She talked about what their plans were (I assume partly to give me time to process the bad news), and then she asked me what my reaction was.

I decided at that moment to completely focus on that, not to worry, and trust the norwegian healthcare system 100%.

(Another thing I decided was to not ask questions I didn't want the answer to. In this case, what's written above was the only thing I knew at that time, but towards the end of the treatment I've been told that I had one tumor in the colon, and 21 metastases in the liver. She might have been a bit optimistic, but that was what I needed at the time.)

Initial treatment

With that diagnosis I was referred to what's called a cancer patient pathway. This is a program in the healthcare system which includes hard deadlines for progress through the sub treatments and a system for coordination between the different hospitals involved.

The number one priority was to save as much as possible of the liver, and removing all the metastases from it. This involves chemotherapy, so it was decided that I would go through surgery to alleviate the problems caused by the tumor, with a focus on quick recovery so the chemotherapy could start as soon as possible.

This turned out to include two colostomy surgeries (because of a hernia a week after the first one I had to repeat the surgery), and then a minor surgery to install a so-called VAP, a central port connected to a large vein in the neck. This port allows the doctors and nurses to administer large amounts of medicine (as in, chemotherapy) without risk of damage to the smaller veins in the arms and wrists.

After this series of relatively easy surgeries and with all tumors and metastases intact, I turned up for the first treatment at the cancer department of Lovisenberg hospital. Here I met some of the best, most competent nurses of these entire pathway, they really helped me feel safe and optimistic throughout this part of the treatment.

The chemotherapy in itself wasn't too interesting, they hooked up 3-4 big bags of medicine to the VAP, and then there was a set regime of which order these were given in and which could be combined. Because of the VAP though, after 3-4 hours I was sent home with just a small bottle connected to the VAP, which administered the final medicine over 48 hours, after which I returned to Lovisenberg so they could disconnect it in a safe way.

This allowed me to stay home for most of the chemotherapy period, instead of having to go to the hospital every day for a week. As I was napping a lot of the time, this might not have made a big difference, but it felt like I had a more normal life.

Best christmas present ever

These treatments continued every other week, after 4 rounds of chemo I was sent to a CT scan to get the first actual measurement of the progress up to that point. By this time we've come to the beginning of December.

A week after I turned up for the regular appointment with my oncologist, and she could tell me that

Until then I had experienced only manageable side effects of the treatment, so we agreed that with such a fantastic result we would continue full speed ahead.

(One slightly interesting detail about chemotherapy is that it isn't one thing, instead they combine a number of types of medicine in a package tuned to your diagnosis and your body. In my case blood tests had revealed that my body doesn't produce enough of an enzyme that is needed to process one of these chemo types. Because of this we started with a 50% strength dose of that specific type, and then increased the dosage slowly. This time we increased the dosage to 80% strength.)

Thus started a lightly unpleasant period, lasting until new years eve, where the side effects went into full strength, including periods of continuous diarreah regardless of how many Imodiums I took.

This then led to a significant lack of magnesium in my body, which is crucial for one of the other types of chemo to work. To remedy this I spent a day in the ER at Lovisenberg hooked up to bags of intravenous magnesium. And then the treatment continued with the next chemotherapy session the next day, only this time we had reduced the dosage back down to a manageable level, which fixed the side effects.

By this time the expert groups for colon cancer (at Ullevål) and liver cancer (at Rikshospitalet) had gone through all the tests, treatment results, and general progress. They decided that I was a suitable candidate for surgery, but in order to create a "buffer" of inactivity they wanted me to go through a total of 8 rounds of chemo. As we'd now found the proper dosage these were as unexiting as the first couple of rounds.

This all took a while, first the chemotherapy, and then the time needed to establish that the cancer was in a stable, inactive, state with no further growth without regular chemo.

Liver surgery, summer 2026

The week after 17th May I had the first liver surgery at Rikshospitalet. Apparently the liver is kind of magic, because this was their plan: The liver consists of two "parts", a left side and a right side. Usually these are significantly different in size (and thus capacity), in my case it was 20% left side and 80% right side. In the first surgery they would remove all metastases from the small left side. This surgery was successful, but took a while. Then a couple days later they would glue up (as far as I understood it) the nutrition supply to the larger right side. This would encourage the left side to grow, so that it could assume the full functionality of the liver.

A month or so later new CT scans showed that this had indeed worked, the left side had now grown 50% (so approx. 30% of the old total volume). I went back to Rikshospitalet for a second and more complicated liver surgery, where they now removed the entire right side.

All three of these procedures were successful, later scans have shown zero metastases, but the original tumor, that was almost invisible after the chemo rounds, was now starting to grow again.

This was expected, so no big surprise, but it did mean that it was time for the final surgery, however much I had recovered or not from those surgeries.

Home stretch, last tumor removed

A couple of weeks ago I turned up at the patient hotel at Ullevål, ready for one more trip to the surgery room. The surgeon went through the plans for the surgery, explained what might happen after such an invasive surgery, and so on. He'd originally indicated that they would perform the surgery with a robot, but now the entire surgery room where the robot lives needed maintenance. Color me surprised, not.

The surgeon was genuinely glad to tell me how happy he was to see me there, since he'd never had a patient with this many metastases get through the proceeding treatments in good enough shape for him to perform the surgery.

Anyway, he and a colleague blocked out the entire day for my surgery, from the scans they knew it would be complicated and time consuming.

The evening of Friday, 14th August I woke up in the post-op room at Ullevål, and for the first time in 11 months I could consider myself healthy and well.

Follow up

I'll need to go through a number of CT and MRI scans in the coming years, with lots of follow up from the doctors, but I don't care.

Right now, I'm cancer free.