There is a particular kind of work that no one sees.
Not the work you are paid for. Not the work that appears on a calendar or gets recorded in a system or earns acknowledgment from the people around you. I mean the other kind — the kind you do alone, in the early morning before the day has begun, or late at night after it has ended, or in the quiet hours between appointments when the world outside continues as if nothing unusual is happening.
This is the story of that work.
Flemingsbergsviken Nature Reserve. The water, the reeds, the open sky. This was the world just outside the door.
September came. The four infusions were done.
The weeks of MabThera — the drip, the curtained room, the blood test before each session, the careful rhythm of treatment — had run their course. The medicine had been delivered. Now came the part that no one schedules and no one can do for you: the part where you wait, and watch, and keep the body going while the results take shape inside you.
I was still on sick leave. But in my own mind, I had already decided what these weeks were. Not time lost. Not time stolen by illness. A journey — inward, private, necessary. The kind that asks everything of you precisely because no one else can see it happening.
The quiet work had already begun. And it was not going to stop.
The Morning
Every morning began the same way.
Before coffee. Before the news. Before anything else had a chance to take the day — I went to the apparatus.
Weight. Blood pressure. Pulse. Temperature. Each measurement taken carefully, each value entered into Beurer HealthManager on the laptop, logged automatically with date and time. Then the same data entered manually into Clarus PHR — the personal health record I was building in parallel, my own version of what Karolinska was tracking in their systems.
I had become my own laboratory. A laboratory of one, operating out of an apartment in Huddinge, with instruments purchased one by one and connected by Bluetooth and intention.
The numbers told a story. Not always a dramatic story — often just the ordinary story of a body doing its best under unusual pressure. But I needed to read that story every day. Not from anxiety. From discipline. From the understanding that what you measure, you can manage. What you watch, you can respond to. What you know, you can face.
The data accumulated. Day by day, week by week — a map of my own body drawn in numbers, growing more detailed with every morning I sat down at the table and took the measurements.
The Plate
Then came breakfast.
Not a casual meal. A decision.
Every morning. Organic, gluten-free, four-grain. Not chosen by appetite — chosen by what the body needed.
Organic gluten-free four-grain porridge — Urtekram, always organic, certified. The purple package became a fixture on the kitchen shelf. The pink bowl became part of the morning ritual — filled, measured, eaten with the focused attention of someone who understood that food was not comfort during these weeks. It was medicine of a different kind.
I had set a target: a minimum of 2,500 calories per day. Not a guess, not an approximation — a calculated decision, based on everything I had read about what a body under treatment requires to maintain the conditions for recovery. The food scale on the counter was not a detail. It was an instrument, as important as the blood pressure apparatus or the thermometer.
Every ingredient was weighed. Every meal logged. Every nutritional value checked against the daily target. Protein, fibre, vitamins, minerals — not obsessively, but carefully. With the same attention I gave to the Beurer readings each morning.
The porridge was the anchor. Warm, slow, deliberate. It started the day on the right terms — not rushed, not improvised, not surrendered to whatever the morning felt like offering. I chose what went into the body. That choosing mattered more than I can easily explain.
And alongside the food: supplements. For the Omega 3 I needed — high dose, over 1,000 IU — I turned to Carlson Labs, a supplement manufacturer based in Lincolnshire, Illinois. I ordered through LuckyVitamin.com in Pennsylvania, because the concentration available in Sweden was not sufficient for what I needed. Vitamins from Apotea. Each one selected, each one timed, each one part of the same quiet strategy. I did not care about the distance. I did not care about the price.
The Route
After breakfast, I went outside.
This was not negotiable. Whatever the weather. Whatever the energy level. Whatever the body felt like saying about the idea of moving through the world on a September morning in Flemingsberg — I went.
Walking. Sometimes cycling. The routes were the same ones I had always used — paths through the neighbourhood I knew by instinct, roads that led toward the nature reserve and back, the particular geography of Huddinge that I had made my own over years of choosing to live here.
Gulavägen, Flemingsberg. Autumn arriving on the path. One foot in front of the other — that was the whole strategy.
Autumn was arriving while I walked. The trees along Gulavägen turning gold and amber, the light changing its angle, the air carrying that particular Swedish September coolness that arrives without announcement and stays. I walked into it. I walked through it. I did not walk to feel better, exactly — though sometimes that happened. I walked because the body that was fighting needed to remain a body that moved. Stillness was not an option I could afford.
There is something that happens when you keep moving through a landscape you know well. The mind quiets in a different way than it does indoors. The measurements from the morning become abstract. The appointments ahead become distant. There is only the path, and the light, and the sound of leaves, and the next step.
I carried the illness with me on those walks. I also, for stretches of time, left it behind.
Both things were true at once.
The Scan
Monday, 9 October 2017 — 08:00
Röntgenkliniken, Karolinska University Hospital, Huddinge
Three weeks after the last infusion, the body was read again.
A datortomografiundersökning — a CT scan of the abdomen. Referred by Team Lymfoid öppenvård, Huddinge Hematologiskt Centrum. Dr. Kristina Sonnevi’s name on the kallelse. Eight o’clock on a Monday morning, before the working day had fully begun, before the hospital corridors had reached their ordinary noise.
The scan was a question put to the body: what has changed?
The first CT — back in July, before any of this had a name — had shown what was there. This one would show what remained. Whether the four weeks of MabThera had done what they were designed to do. Whether the wrong cells had retreated, or held their ground, or done something else entirely.
I lay still inside the machine. The machine did what machines do — precisely, without comment, without the particular warmth of the nurses at Hematologiskt Centrum. It simply read. And what it found would determine what came next.
The results would inform the second phase of treatment. A new schedule. A new location. The quiet work was not finished — it was entering a new chapter.
The Email
My brother was following everything from the other side of the world.
We had always been close in the way that brothers are close when distance has become the permanent condition of their relationship — not through daily contact, but through the understanding that what matters to one matters to the other, across whatever distance lies between. He was in Longview, Washington, on the west coast of the United States. I was in Huddinge. The kilometres between us were not negotiable. But the connection was.
I had sent him the Lymphoma app — the one I had found in the Apple Store and Windows Store, published by an American lymphoma research institute. I wanted him to understand not just that I was ill, but what the illness was. What it did. How it behaved. What the treatment was trying to accomplish. I did not want to translate it all into summary and reassurance in a message. I wanted him to have the same source I had, to read the same words, to build the same picture.
He wrote back.
I will not reproduce what he said word for word. Some things belong to the private archive of a family, and his letters are among them. But I will say this: he wrote with the particular combination of directness and warmth that I have always recognised in him. He had downloaded the app. He had read it. He had questions — real questions, not the soft questions people ask when they are trying not to alarm you, but the questions of someone who wanted to understand.
Those emails — his from Longview, mine from Huddinge — became part of the treatment in their own way. Not medicine. Not data. Something harder to measure and equally necessary: the knowledge that someone on the other side of the world was paying attention. Was reading. Was there.
You are not as alone as the apartment sometimes makes you feel.
I knew that. I needed reminding anyway.
The City
Huddinge was not only the place where I was ill.
It was the place I had chosen. The place I had come to — not by accident, not by necessity, but by a series of decisions that had accumulated into a life. And that life did not stop because a lymphoma had appeared in it. It continued, quietly, alongside everything else.
Sjödalsparken, Huddinge Centrum. The Jazz and Blues Festival. Music in the open air. Life, continuing.
Sjödalsparken in Huddinge Centrum — the outdoor stage, the wooden benches, the crowd gathered in the summer air to listen. The Huddinge Jazz and Blues Festival. I had been there before the diagnosis. I would be there again.
I include this not because it happened during the treatment weeks — the timing was its own. But because it represents something I needed to hold onto through those weeks: the knowledge that the city around me was alive, that culture was happening, that music was being played in public parks by people who did not know my name or my diagnosis, and that this was right and good and part of what I was fighting to return to.
Huddinge is not a city that announces itself. It does not have the drama of a capital or the noise of a place that needs to be noticed. It has parks, and commuter trains, and nature reserves at the edge of the residential streets, and festivals in summer where people sit on benches and listen to jazz. It is, in other words, a place where an ordinary life can be lived with genuine attention.
That is why I chose it. That is why I still live here.
And during those September weeks, when the treatment was done and the waiting had begun and the quiet work was the only work there was — I held the image of that park, that music, those benches in the open air, as evidence of what ordinary looked like. As something to walk back toward.
The Radio
FK FM on iTunes. Classical category. 330 streams. Broadcasting from an apartment in Huddinge — while everything else was also happening.
While all of this was happening — the measurements, the walks, the porridge, the emails from Longview, the appointments at Karolinska — something else was running quietly in the background.
FK FM. My online radio station.
I had built it myself, starting in 2014, out of a desire to broadcast music with intention — carefully selected, carefully sequenced, sent out into the world through a stream that anyone with the right app could find. It appeared in iTunes under Classical, among 330 other streams. It ran from this apartment. From this desk. From a life that was, in 2017, simultaneously managing lymphoma and continuing to create.
I do not think of the radio as a distraction from the illness. I think of it as evidence of the same thing the walks were evidence of, the same thing the porridge was evidence of, the same thing the measurements were evidence of: that the self does not stop when the body is under pressure. That creativity does not wait for health. That the work continues — quietly, without announcement, in the background of everything else — because stopping it would have been a different kind of surrender than I was willing to make.
The radio ran. The body healed. Both things were true, simultaneously, in the same apartment, on the same ordinary days.
because it is small.
It is quiet because
no one is watching.
Because it asks nothing
of anyone else.
Because it happens
in the space between
what the world sees
and what actually keeps you alive.
November now.
The light leaving earlier each day.
The apparatus waiting on the table.
The body, still here.
Still working.
The Weight No One Asked About
There came a day — one of the infusion days, somewhere in those four September weeks — when I came home and could not carry it anymore.
Not the illness. Not the measurements or the diet or the walks. Something smaller, and therefore larger.
I was reaching for the sofa — just beginning to put things down, to let myself stop, to allow the exhaustion that had been building since the morning to finally arrive somewhere it could rest — when she came to me with the shopping list.
“Here, if you want to buy some food.”
I looked at it. I looked at her.
And something that had been held very tightly for a long time came loose all at once. I was angry.
I do not remember the exact words. I know they were not gentle. They came from somewhere below reasoning — from the place where months of managing alone had been quietly accumulating, without a proper exit. What came out was not a complaint. It was not even really directed at her. It was the sound of a body and a mind that had reached the edge of what they could carry without being seen.
I am not pretending. This is not a small thing. I need to rest.
Only louder. And with everything I had been holding.
Because this was real: while I was managing the illness, I was also managing the household. The food shopping. The meals. The errands. Two, three times a week. Not because it had been formally decided — simply because that was how things worked, and illness had not renegotiated the terms.
I was not angry at her, exactly. I was angry at the weight. At the invisibility of what I was carrying. At the gap between how serious this was and how ordinary the day still seemed to everyone around me.
The sofa. The list. The moment.
Some things are small enough to hold everything.
That evening, I lay down. Outside the window, the last of the November dark had settled over the rooftops of Flemingsberg. The radio was still running somewhere in the background. The body that had been treated, and walked, and measured, and fed with intention — that body finally stopped.
And in the stopping, something was released. Not resolved. Not healed. But released — into the quiet of an apartment in Huddinge, where the quiet work had been happening all along, and would go on happening, seen or unseen, for as long as it needed to.
Three dates.
Three times: 13:30.
December. January. February.
The arrow on the card meant same.
Same treatment. Same reason.
Same body, carrying the same quiet work
into the dark of a Swedish winter.
You do not ask winter for permission.
You simply put on your coat
and go.
The card sat on the table beside the apparatus. Three more dates. The quiet work was not finished — it was only changing shape, moving into a different season, asking the same thing it had always asked: that I show up, that I measure, that I keep going through whatever the calendar placed in front of me next.