Birgitta Ohlsson lives and works in Washington.
Photo: YLWA YNGVESSON
Three years ago, Birgitta Ohlsson received the news that she had breast cancer. It was so serious that she didn’t think she would survive. But after 34 rounds of chemotherapy and several operations where 22 lymph nodes were removed, she was cancer-free, although she lives “from X-ray to X-ray”.
– I used to think about cancer every day. Now a week can go by without me thinking about it. I’m too busy thinking about war and dictatorship instead, she tells DN.
In the same vein as the breast cancer diagnosis, Birgitta Olsson got her dream job: To work with the global crisis of democracy, at the long-standing think tank National Democratic Institute. Due to the pandemic and illness, the move to the USA was postponed, but last fall it was finally time. In October, the moving party left and shortly afterwards she started her new job. Then the bomb drops – she has cancer again.
On January 17, she was diagnosed with acute aggressive leukemia.
Ohlsson: Death sentence – again
– I had had a completely normal weekend. We went to the cinema with the children, I had worked out at the gym and then worked late. In the evening I suddenly got a high fever and started to feel sick. The next day my husband called for an ambulance, she says.
Then she had sepsis and pneumonia. The next day, she was told that she also had leukemia.
– Everything went black and it felt as if I had received a death sentence. Again.
She says in the interview that it appears to be the chemotherapy that gave her the leukemia. Leukemia is a form of blood cancer, and according to the Cancer Association, between 5-6 percent get the disease from a previous chemotherapy treatment.
Birgitta Ohlsson was a Member of Parliament for the Liberals for 16 years and between the years 2010-2014 was EU Minister and Minister for Democracy.
In 2017, she challenged Jan Björklund for the position of party leader for the Liberals but lost and chose to leave politics after that.
READ MORE: Birgitta Ohlsson has got cancer – tells herself
