Mette-Marit on lung transplant waiting list
Crown Princess Mette-Marit has been placed on the waiting list for a lung transplant. Her chronic lung disease is now described as life-threatening, and the operation could come at any time.
June 5, 2026
Crown Princess Mette-Marit, pictured before her lung disease. Photo: Fjellnisse, CC BY-SA 3.0
Placed on the transplant list
On Friday 5 June 2026, the Royal House announced that Crown Princess Mette-Marit has been placed on the waiting list for a lung transplant, citing her life-threatening chronic lung disease. According to her physician at Rikshospitalet (The National Hospital), a comprehensive medical assessment has placed her among those to be transplanted as soon as possible — which means the operation could now come at any time. While Mette-Marit waits, she will not be able to work or carry out official duties.
On Friday afternoon, the Crown Princess's physician, Are Holm, and heart and lung surgeon Arnt Fiane held a press conference at Rikshospitalet to explain what the decision involves.
The announcement came a day after the Crown Princess visited Rikshospitalet on Thursday.
Her family has gathered around her. Princess Ingrid Alexandra has returned from her studies in Australia to be closer to home and will continue as an exchange student in Oslo, while the Crown Prince is adjusting his own programme to spend more time with her in the period ahead.
Meanwhile, the Crown Princess's eldest son, Marius Borg Høiby, has asked to be released from custody, pointing to his mother's serious illness, ahead of the verdict in his criminal trial due on 15 June. The police have rejected Høiby's request.
The Crown Princess will not be prioritised ahead of others
Being placed on the waiting list does not mean joining a fixed, numbered queue, and it brings no precedence for the Crown Princess over anyone else waiting. It is not a matter of who has waited the longest. When a donor lung becomes available, it comes with a particular size and a particular blood group, and the medical team looks at who on the list that organ actually fits. Among those it fits, the choice always falls on the patient who is sickest — the one with the least time and the least capacity to keep waiting.
This makes the wait deeply unpredictable. A matching organ might appear within a day, or it might never come. Patients on the list must be reachable at all hours and prepared to come in at very short notice.
All lung transplants in Norway are carried out at Rikshospitalet, which performs around 30 a year. After it was reported in December that Mette-Marit needed a lung transplant, the waiting list has been historically short, which has given rise to speculation about possible prioritisation.
The lungs do not have to come from Norway. Through the Nordic cooperation Scandiatransplant, which links Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Estonia, donor organs can be shared across borders. In 2025, Norway received four lungs from abroad, all of them from Sweden. It is therefore possible that the Crown Princess could receive lungs from another country.
What lies ahead for the Crown Princess
There is no fixed answer to how long the wait may be. It is highly variable — a well-matched organ can turn up quickly, or the wait can stretch on with no guarantee — though the typical waiting time falls somewhere between roughly five months and a year. Once a match is found, everything moves fast: a donor lung cannot remain outside the body for long, and the operation has to follow within hours.
The timing of a transplant is a fine balance. A patient must be ill enough to need it, with limited life expectancy, before it becomes relevant at all — yet still well enough to survive a major operation. Listed too late, and the patient may no longer tolerate the surgery; the right moment has to be found. Pulmonary fibrosis itself is a dangerous disease that can ultimately be fatal, even when it is not obvious from day to day: at rest, breathing may seem fine, but under exertion the lungs can no longer keep up. A transplant is regarded as the last available treatment — something undertaken only when truly necessary, and done to save life.
It is also a daunting prospect. A lung transplant is one of the most demanding operations performed, carrying a significant risk of complications such as bleeding, infection and rejection of the new lungs. According to figures from Oslo University Hospital, around 85 to 90 per cent of patients are alive one year after surgery, and 70 to 75 per cent after five years , and about 50% after 10 years. Recovery is slow and demanding: recipients must guard carefully against infection, since the body is left more vulnerable, and they must take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives, because a transplanted lung remains a foreign body requiring constant, often intensive follow-up. Even so, after a successful transplant many patients regain normal lung function and can return to work and an ordinary daily life — and in that, the doctors stress, there is genuine hope.
The doctors at Rikshospitalet addressed the media during the press conference reminding that it is illegal to identify an organ donor, and appealed for great respect for the situation: behind every donation lies a death, and a grieving family.