Suzan & Freek were visibly emotional during their TV appearance on Eva Jinek’s talk show. The terminally ill Freek does not give up hope. “I am now also looking at Eastern medicine.”
It was an incredible shock at the end of May: Freek Rikkerink from the popular duo Suzan & Freek turned out to be terminally ill. Yesterday, five months later, the two gave their first major TV interview, with Eva Jinek. “I immediately said to the pulmonologist: ‘What can we do?’, you know,” says Freek about the moment he heard the bad news.
‘Let’s go’
Hope was immediately dashed, says Freek at the table Eva. “I said, ‘Let’s go, what are we going to do? Start today.’ Then he said: ‘It has spread and it is really so serious that we can no longer do anything for you. All we can do is extend life.’”
His beloved Suzan Stortelder: “Then the ground drops from under your feet for a moment. (…) That moment is still a great trauma and that is why we find it difficult to talk about it, because we don’t talk about it that much, because we try to think: we are here now, now we feel good. Going back to that moment is still very intense.”
‘I didn’t believe it’
Suzan felt the ground fall from under her feet. “We were in shock, I think. We started shouting things around that room, I think. I stood up and shouted all kinds of things across that room. Then we sat down and then Freek said: ‘I would like to see where it all is.'”
Freek: “I didn’t believe it. Then he showed it and when you suddenly see it on a computer screen, you think: Jesus man, this is just in my body.”
Confetti jar
Freek’s metastatic lung cancer is pure bad luck, he says. “It is a very rare form that only occurs in 1 percent of lung cancers. There is simply nothing you can do about it. You have drawn the wrong fate.”
The metastases are everywhere. “So I have a tumor in both lungs and further in the lymph, in my neck, in my adrenal glands. Between here and here it is a kind of fallen confetti pot. Fortunately, it is not in my head.”
Five years
How long does Freek have to live? He is now on life-extending therapy. “They said: ‘We have medication, you can try that. It may work. There are people who can live with it for a few more years.’ On the one hand I thought: how nice, but then I thought: a few years? Sorry, should I be happy that I can live another five years?”
He wants to live much longer than just those five years. “I thought: if my child is 5 and I die, wouldn’t it be twice as bad? I found that very difficult.”
Oriental medicine
The tumors have shrunk considerably and in the meantime Freek is pinning his hopes on alternative medicine. “In Western medicine they see the body as a kind of chemical factory, like: something is broken in the body, unfortunately. But if you look at Eastern medicine, they look much more at the connection between your body and you mind.”
Suzan: “We are just completely open to it. We hope that if we do everything we can make the chance that when the universe says: everything will be fine, that we will be there.”