Dolph Lundgren who played Ivan Drago in Sylvester Stallone’s movie Rocky IV, recently revealed that he has been battling with cancer for eight years.
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In a recent appearance at “In Depth With Graham Bensinger,” the actor told host Graham Bensinger on Wednesday, May 10, that the first time he was diagnosed with Kidney Cancer was in 2015.
“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 explained that the doctors he met in Los Angeles discovered he had cancerous tumors in his kidney.
“Then I did scans every six months. Then you do it every year and it was fine for five years. 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.”
Dolph Lundgren — Dolph Omitted A Tumor And It Grew
The 65-year-old actor went on to share that he underwent surgery to have the tumors removed and six tumors were successfully removed, however, things turned bad after he was called back because the doctors discovered one more tumor hidden in his liver.
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“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,'” said Dolph.
He continued, “At that point, it started to hit me that this is kind of something serious. 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.'”
Dolph went on to share how he underwent systematic therapy but it didn’t take long for him to have “side effects where I got diarrhea, and so I lost a lot of weight.” The experience was a sad one, especially for his “poor fiancée [Emma Krokdal,] who suffered through that.”
The “Kindergarten Cop 2” actor also said that his doctors in Cedar hoarded his health information and refused to let him in on how bad it is, “I didn’t hear from the people at Cedars for six months. They never called me or anything, I think now, thinking back, they probably thought, ‘Oh, I’m a lost case.'”
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Rather than tell him how bad his condition is, they, “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.”
Dolph Lundgren — Dolph Got A Second Opinion
Following his dealings with his doctors from Cedar, the actor fell into depression, and began to recount the kind of life he lived on earth, how he’s been good to people and all that. He said he sought out a second opinion.
Luckily, his physician was able to treat his kidney cancer by targeting a mutation he had that is common in lung cancer. Dolph said, “If I’d gone on the other treatment, I had about three or four months left.”
He further said, “I couldn’t believe that that it would be that radical of a difference that within three months, things were shrinking by 20, 30%. 2022 was basically watching these medications do their thing and finally things that shrunk into about 90%. Now I’m in the process of taking out the remaining scar tissue of these tumors.”
“Hopefully when they take these out, there is no cancer activity, and the medication that I’m taking is going to suppress everything else.”
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