‘This has been an extraordinary journey, and I’m OK if this is the end’
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Dave Coulier has made peace with the fact that this “could be the end” following his cancer diagnosis.
The 65-year-old actor – who is best known for starring as Joey Gladstone on the classic ABC sitcom Full House – recently announced that he is suffering from stage three Non-Hodgkin lymphoma but has already an “incredible life” so has come to terms with the idea of death.
He told Today.com: “I told Melissa I don’t know why, but I (am) OK with whatever the news (is) going to be no matter how devastating. I can’t explain where that came from.
“I’ve had an incredible life.
“I’ve had the most amazing people in my life. This has been an extraordinary journey, and I’m OK if this is the end of the journey.”
But when Dave first received the news that he was suffering from the disease, he admitted that it felt like he had been “punched in the stomach” and had never imagined it actually happening to him.
“The first thing I said to them was, ‘Wait a minute – cancer?’ “I was feeling like I got punched in the stomach because it never happens to you.
“You always hear about it happening to someone else.”
Dave was diagnosed with the form of blood cancer in October after an upper respiratory infection led to swelling in his lymph nodes, and medics immediately conducted PET and CT scans and a biopsy.
The Surreal Life star – who was previously married to Jayne Modean and has 24-year-old son Luc with her but has now been married to Melissa Bring for a decade – underwent a test to check for cancer cells within his bone marrow and when that came back negative, he felt a flash of optimism as his chances of survival increased.
He said: “We all kind of put our heads together and said, ‘Okay, where are we going?’ And they had a very specific plan for how they were going to treat this?
“At that point, (when the test came back negative) my chances of curable went from something low to 90 per cent range. And so that was a great day.”
Dave started chemotherapy two weeks after his diagnosis and shaved his head as a “preemptive strike” so he could tackle the whole ordeal “head-on”.
Speaking on the Full House Rewind podcast, he told co-host Marla Sokoloff: “I started the podcast wearing a hat, and I said, I’ve always been a man of many hats, but this hat has special significance because a couple of weeks ago, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“That was 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.”