Dolph Lundgren had already spent years fighting cancer when the conversation with his brother took a turn he had never expected.
What if the treatment stopped helping completely? What if the pain became unbearable? And what if, by then, he was too sick to make decisions for himself?
Lundgren says he began thinking about assisted suicide.
The actor writes about that period in his new memoir, Fights Worth Fighting: Finding Strength in Struggle. His brother Johan knew what he was considering and was prepared to help him travel to Europe if Lundgren eventually decided to go through with it.
He never got that far.
Around the same time, Lundgren met another oncologist. She looked again at the cancer he had been treating for years, ordered another biopsy and found information that changed his treatment.
Months later, his tumors were shrinking.
That sequence makes Lundgren’s story far more troubling than the usual story of surviving cancer. He had reached the point of discussing how he might die shortly before another doctor gave him a treatment that worked.
Doctors Had Been Treating His Cancer Since 2015
Lundgren’s cancer battle started in 2015, when doctors found a tumor in his kidney. It was removed, and he continued with regular scans.
For several years, things remained under control. Then more tumors appeared in 2020.
Doctors removed six of them, but another tumor kept growing. Eventually it became too large to operate on. Lundgren was still making films during much of this period, including The Expendables 4, so very little of what was happening was obvious to the public.
Behind the scenes, doctors were giving him a much darker picture.
In a 2023 interview about his cancer treatment, Lundgren remembered asking one of his doctors how long he had left.
The answer was two or three years.
Lundgren thought the doctor actually expected less.
His family was already living with the same fear. Doctors had encouraged him to stop working so much and spend more time with the people close to him. For Lundgren, the question was no longer only which treatment came next. He was starting to think about what would happen if there was no useful treatment left.
He Talked To His Brother About Ending His Life
Lundgren’s memoir fills in a part of the story that he had not discussed in the same detail before.
During the worst period of treatment, he became depressed and spoke to his brother Johan about assisted suicide. Lundgren was worried that his physical condition could deteriorate so far that he would no longer be capable of acting without help.
The conversation included the possibility of traveling to a European country where assisted dying is legal under certain conditions.
There was no booking, no final plan and no attempt. Lundgren says the idea never moved past the discussion with his brother.
Then Dr. Alexandra Drakaki entered the picture.
Drakaki, an oncologist at UCLA Health, took another look at Lundgren’s case. A new biopsy showed a mutation commonly associated with lung cancer.
That finding gave her another treatment option.
Lundgren had spent years being treated under a kidney cancer diagnosis. Drakaki was able to put him on a drug used for lung cancer that targeted the mutation found in his tumor.
And the cancer responded.
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Within Months, The Tumors Were Shrinking
Lundgren said the difference appeared quickly. Within about three months, his tumors had shrunk by roughly 20% to 30%. Continued treatment brought much larger reductions, with Lundgren later estimating that some had shrunk by around 90%.
Drakaki said during his 2023 interview that some lesions could no longer be seen.
The timing was extraordinary. Lundgren had recently been hearing that he might have only a few years left. He later said that if he had continued with the previous treatment, he believed he might have had only three or four months.
Now doctors were talking about keeping the cancer under control for years.
There is also a detail worth getting right here. Recent coverage of Lundgren’s memoir describes his case as a misdiagnosis, with Lundgren saying doctors had treated him for kidney cancer before Drakaki determined that he actually had lung cancer.
His earlier explanation in 2023 was more specific. Lundgren said a new biopsy found a mutation that is common in lung cancer and that Drakaki used that finding to change his treatment.
Those accounts point to the same turning point, but they are not quite the same medical description. What is clear from both is that another review of his cancer produced information that radically changed what doctors did next.
Closing Thoughts
Lundgren’s story leaves an uncomfortable thought behind. A diagnosis does more than decide which treatment comes next. It changes how a person thinks about work, family, time and, in his case, even life.
Doctors will not always have complete certainty, especially with complicated cancers. That makes it even more important to say when there is doubt, revisit a diagnosis when treatment keeps failing and bring in another specialist before major decisions are made. A wrong conclusion can send years of treatment in the wrong direction, and the consequences can reach far outside the hospital.
Lundgren was fortunate that somebody looked again. Had that happened later, his story could have ended before anyone discovered that the medical picture was incomplete.
