When you're diagnosed with cancer it's not only angst, fear and a lot of thoughts and a reassessment of your life that comes with it. On a practical note, you have to - at least I did - go through a lot of tests, e.g. CT-scans, where you have to drink some thick contrast fluid, blood tests once a week, x-ray of the lungs every 3 weeks, administration of radioactive substance so they can test the kidney function, gastroscopy and a lot more.

All these tests kept me busy for the first couple of weeks after I was diagnosed. At first the doctors thought I had lymphatic cancer, tissue samples from 3 gastroscopies would decide this. Unfortunately, nobody could tell me which type of cancer I had. Therefore, I had to have an ultrasound-guided biopsy where they insert a needle in a lymph node and take out some tissue. Unfortunately, they were not able to do it, as the lymph nodes were too difficult to get at.

So therefore I had to have an operation. This was done on 4th January 2001 at Rigshospitalet and they extracted 5 swollen lymph nodes from the stomach area. All went well and I was discharged from hospital.

A couple of days later I, unfortunately, got the sad message that they still couldn't type the cancer. But they believed they could exclude many of them, so now I could be passed on to the oncological ward.

My first talk with the doctors at the oncological ward will be on 23rd January 2001. The doctor tells me that my diagnosis is "unknown primary tumour" and that they can't do more to find out what type it is. The chemotherapy they can offer is an experimental chemo, which has shown good results in the labs. The prognosis was difficult to make, as it is an experiment, but aprox. 50% of the patients with unknown primary tumour (at this time there were 14 of them at Rigshospitalet) had reacted to the chemotherapy. But this prognosis says nothing about being cured. It talks about a reaction to the chemo. So statistically, my chance for being cured is less than 50%.

This is what I have found on the Internet on the subject:

"The median survival for patients with unknown primary tumour is 4-5,5 months and aprox. ¼ of the patients are still alive after 1 year of having been diagnosed. 3 and 5 years survival is 11% and 6% respectively.

"Excluding the conditions which are being treated with a curative intention, the prognosis is generally bad with a typical survival of less than 1 year".

So I started my chemo on Friday 9th February. I'm given the drugs Taxol, Cisplatin and Gemcitabin. According to the doctors it's a rough treatment and I could expect a lot of side effects. I'm now starting my 4th series.