Update.

Fear. Panic. Emptiness. Drained. Confused. These are some of the feelings that went through me when my life changed on August 1. My boyfriend got diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. It was very difficult to wrap my head around this. He’s very young and I associate lung cancer with older men or women who smokes/smoked a lot. But it can happen to anyone. If you have lungs, you can get cancer in them, as they say in information material from the Swedish patient federation.

On August 1 I was about 19 weeks pregnant with our second child. We’ve gone through the testing for Duchennes (I’m a carrier) and everything was looking good. After 2 years corona we were ready and starting to build our lives up again with meeting friends and family and we had planned a 3 week visit to my family and friends in Sweden and Norway. My boyfriend had had back pain on and off, sometimes severe, but we didn’t think it was more than: “if you’re older than 30 you’re bound to get some back pain once in a while”. It came back after some physical therapy and he went to have an x-ray, for peace of mind. What came back: cancer.

Food wasn’t my priority from then on. I couldn’t work, clean and struggled to take care of the family. I had no appetite for weeks and ‘What’s for dinner?’ became a loaded, anxiety-inducing question. Our family and friends fed us with delicious home-cooked meals (Thank you so much for this!). And we filled in with take-out other days. Not always the healthiest choices but that was what we could do at the time. I tried looking on the internet for weekly menus for cancer patients but I couldn’t find anything. I had no energy for figuring out breakfast, lunch or dinner. I just wanted to take something from a list and follow a recipe to the letter and not have to think. The first month was really being ready to go for blood tests, scans or talks with sometimes 30 min notice. When it started to be clearer where and how the treatment was going to be and when the treatment started, we got some kind of rythm again. But I don’t cook complicated food anymore. It has to be easy and quick.

We made pizza from store-bought dough with our daughter. Such a nice friday activity!

This week is chemo-week and big flavours are a bit difficult for my boyfriend. I managed to make tonkatsu, which he loved!

First milestone in our new lives is the birth of our second child, coming up in end of december. Hopefully the treatment will work and we get a lot of time together!