Courtesy of NBC.
This morning, comedian Dave Coulier came out with an unfortunate personal life update: He has been diagnosed with cancer.
The Full House star shared on his Full House Rewind podcast - and also a subsequent interview with People - that he was diagnosed with stage 3 Non-Hodkins Lymphoma. It started out as what he thought was just a cold. Then he noticed swelling in his groin area got to “the size of a golf ball.” At that time, he went to the doctor and got it examined.
“Three days later, my doctors called me back and they said, ‘We wish we had better news for you, but you have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and it's called B cell and it's very aggressive,’” he told the magazine.
According to People, “With non-Hodgkin lymphoma, white blood cells grow abnormally, causing tumors to grow throughout the body, according to the Mayo Clinic. Swollen lymph nodes are a symptom, as Coulier experienced, as well as chest pain or fever.”
Coulier then worked with his doctors on a plan, and they decided on bone marrow treatment. That treatment brought his chances of it being curable from low to 90%, which are obviously incredible odds. He then started chemotherapy, and even wound up preemptively shaving his head.
What Dave Coulier is saying about his cancer diagnosis.
Coulier revealed on his podcast, “[this is] really a conscious decision of, I'm going to meet this head-on, and I want people to know it's my life. I'm not going to try and hide anything. I would rather talk about it and open the discussion and inspire people.”
Coulier said that cancer does run in his family, having lost his sister and his niece to the disease. He added, “I saw what those women in my family went through, and I thought to myself, ‘If I can be just 1/10th of a percent as strong as they were, then I'm going to be just fine.”
While he revealed he does have good days and bad days - he’s already completed his first of six chemotherapy appointments -, he’s going to keep taking things “day by day.” A lifelong hockey fan, he even recently went back onto the ice with some friends. Coulier says he’s “just trying to stay focused on all the great stuff that I have in my life.”
