Lymfom i urinen. Min kropp talade redan.
Lymphoma in the urine. My body was already speaking.
There is a particular kind of suffering that has no name in the medical charts.
It is not pain, exactly. It is not fear, exactly. It lives somewhere between the two — in the space between one appointment and the next, in the silence after a doctor has spoken and before you have fully understood what was said.
It is the weight of waiting.
From the 3rd of July to the 8th of August 2017, I carried that weight.
And I carried it, for most of that time, without fully knowing what I was carrying.
3rd July 2017
It was supposed to be a routine visit.
A post-operation control — a check on how the recovery was progressing after the TUR-P. The kind of appointment you go to because you are supposed to, not because you expect anything.
The urologist examined me. Asked the usual questions. And then, towards the end, said something almost in passing — the way doctors sometimes say the things that change everything:
A remiss had been sent. To Hematology. At Karolinska Huddinge.
I would receive a kallelse — a letter of invitation — with the date and time.
That was all. The appointment was over.
I walked out. The summer was outside, ordinary and bright. I did not fully understand yet what had been set in motion. The referral had happened somewhere in a system I could not see — digitally, behind the scenes, between one specialist and another. I had not held a piece of paper with the word on it. I had only heard a sentence.
But the sentence stayed with me.
The Weeks Between
I went back to work.
This is the part that is strange to explain, because from the outside, life looked the same. I went in. I did my job. I came home. The calendar moved forward.
But the body — the body was telling a different story.
Every ten, twenty minutes, I had to pause. A tiredness that was not ordinary tiredness. A heaviness in the breath. A weakness that sat in the bones. I moved through those weeks the way you move through deep water — everything taking more effort than it should, everything a little slower than it ought to be.
I did not know, then, that these were symptoms. I did not connect them to the word the urologist had said. I had just had an operation. I was recovering. The exhaustion made sense — or seemed to. The body had an explanation that felt sufficient, and I accepted it.
Only much later would I understand that the lymphoma had been speaking all along. Loudly, in fact. I had just been listening to the wrong translation.
Manuel
It was a Chilean-Swedish colleague who first gave me a map.
His name is Manuel. He noticed — the way some people simply notice, without being asked — that something was not right. He asked. And I told him what little I knew: the referral, the waiting, the word that had been said but not yet fully explained.
He listened. And then he told me about his wife.
She had had breast cancer. He knew the territory I was about to enter — the appointments, the investigations, the systems, the decisions you have to make before you fully understand why you are making them. He told me what to expect. He told me what to prepare. He told me about the insurance — to check it, to understand it, to make sure it was in order before the treatment began.
I had not thought of any of these things. I did not yet know enough to think of them.
Manuel knew. And he gave me what he knew, quietly, between colleagues, at a workplace where I was still showing up every day and pausing every twenty minutes to catch my breath.
That conversation was a kind of light. Not the light that tells you everything will be fine — nobody can give you that. But the light that shows you the next step, and the one after, so that the darkness ahead feels a little less absolute.
I have not forgotten it.
26th July 2017 — 15:00
The CT-scan.
It begins before you even arrive at the machine. Thirty minutes before, you drink water — a specific amount, at a specific time. The body must be prepared. Even the preparation has a protocol.
Then the injection. A contrast fluid, sent directly into the bloodstream through the aorta — to make the invisible visible, to help the machine detect anything abnormal moving through the blood circulation. You feel it enter you. A strange warmth, spreading inward.
Before you lie down, you remove everything metal. Watch, belt, coins — anything that belongs to the ordinary world stays outside. There is something almost ceremonial about it. You leave yourself behind, piece by piece, before entering.
And then the machine itself — a large white tube, enormous and very still. Your body slides inside it. The technicians speak to you through the air: breathe in, hold, breathe out. You do as you are told, because what else is there to do?
The machine reads you in a language you will never speak. It sees what you cannot see. It maps the inside of you with a precision that is almost impossible to imagine.
You dress again. You put the ordinary world back on.
You go home. You wait.
1st August 2017 — 10:00
Two things on the same morning, in the same enormous building.
First, the blood samples — blodprovtagning. The hospital laboratory needed them at least a week before I would see the doctor. I took my queue ticket and sat in the waiting room. Ten, maybe twenty minutes. Ordinary waiting — the kind with plastic chairs and a number and a clock that moves by seconds you can hear.
Then I crossed the building to find the right room for the second thing.
The bone marrow biopsy — benmärgsprovtagning.
There was a short queue here too. But this waiting was different. You could hear, faintly, the rhythm of it — each patient called in, five to ten minutes inside, then out. Five to ten minutes. Then the next name. Then the next.
You sat and you counted. You knew what the rhythm meant.
And then I heard my own name called.
Agus.
I went into a quiet room. I remember the quiet very specifically. And in that quiet, I became aware of my own heartbeat — not because it was racing, but because the silence was deep enough to hear it.
A nurse specialist was there. He explained the procedure with a calm that I appreciated, even as the words settled over me:
“I have to insert a small needle around your backbone. Just a little pain.”
A small needle. Just a little pain.
The needle had to enter at a precise point — along the line of the backbone, directly behind the navel. A specific dot. A location the body does not know it has until someone finds it.
I sat in the patient’s chair and took off my shirts. All of them. The back exposed, the spine visible, the body reduced to its simplest form — just a person, just a backbone, just a precise dot that had to be found.
He found the point. He was right that it was precise. He was also right, in his way, about the pain — it was not what I had feared. But it was not nothing, either. It was the feeling of being reached into, of something being taken from the deepest part of you.
They were looking all the way inside now. There was nowhere left to look after this.
I dressed again. I walked back out into the corridor of Karolinska Huddinge.
I knew enough to understand that what they had been searching for was serious.
I had let them search.
The summer was still outside. Still ordinary. Still bright.
But somewhere inside a system I could not see, the results were now travelling — from the laboratory, from the machine, from the bone — toward a room where a doctor was waiting to read them.
I went home. I waited.
One more week.
Episode 3: The Day She Wrote It Down — coming soon.