ROSIE
May 2001
Doctor after doctor said she was okay, but Fran Drescher knew better – and sadly, she was right. In this heart-to-heart, the former Nanny star talks to Rosie about her battle with uterine cancer and the lifesaving lessons she’s learned.
“a quiet hell”
I saw her first on the big screen, in Cadillac Man. She blew me away. Beauty and brawn. Fast and funny. Really funny. Quick enough to spar with Robin Williams. Who was she? Where did she come from?
Queens, it turned out. Not too far from where I grew up. We met on the set of my first film, Car 54, Where Are You? I was scared and clueless. She was calm and generous. She taught me how to hit my mark, and what 12-hour turnaround was. On our days off, we went to museums, debated politics, shared sushi. She took me into her heart and under her wing. The film ended, our friendship flourished. I was welcomed into her family of friends: Peter, Sylvia, Morty, Elaine, Judy, and Donna – each genuine, caring and kind. For the first times since moving to Los Angeles, I felt as if I belonged. Away from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, tucked away in a two-bedroom condo in the Valley. I found an authentic New York home and a true friend.
Ever since, Frannie has been my touchstone, a slice of reality in the land of make-believe. She has been there for me through it all – broken hearts, realized dreams and newfound wishes – offering insight and wisdom along the way. She has taught me many things, most importantly, the joy in the journey.
When I found out Fran had uterine cancer, I cried. Then I called her mom. When I pulled myself together, I called Frannie. She was, as I expected, full of candor and caring, light and love. She took care of me, as I knew she would with her soothing tone and reassuring statistics. I hung up the phone and said aloud, to an empty kitchen, “She is amazing.”
So here is my first magazine cover-story interview. I am thrilled to share my friend Frannie with you, to let you see this woman I feel lucky to know, to love. Let her story inspire us all to be our own health advocates, to trust what we are sure of, to treasure our friends. Thank you, Frannie, for the interview, and so much more. – Rosie
(Fran's dog Chester, with her for 19 years, died shortly after this photo session.)
RO: So tell me how it was from the beginning. You were sick for a while before you knew.
FD: I had midmonth staining. Sometimes I’d go for a day or two where it seemed like I’d gotten my period, but it would stop. Then I’d get my period when I was supposed to get it. I also had some cramping occasionally after intercourse, and so I went to my gynecologist.
RO: Now this how long ago?
FD: More than two years ago. And my latest doctor said – and this is about five months ago, when she operated on me – that I had had it for at least two years.
RO: When you went to the first doctor, your gynecologist, what did she say?
FD: She was fine about giving me a checkup or a Pap smear, but she said, “I feel that you’re too young to have a D&C (dilatation and curettage)” – which is a scraping of the uterine tissue. And instead of asking what it was and what would it tell, I was flattered she thought I was too young so I just left it at that.
RO: So you can diagnose uterine cancer through a D&C?
FD: Yes. And the gynecologist essentially made me believe that I was perimenopausal, that this is how menopause starts. Your period don’t go right anymore. And I asked her about the cramping after sex and told her I usually take an Advil. She said anything that one Advil is going to take away is nothing to be concerned about. But I wanted to get a second opinion, so I went to my internist. He said he’d send me to a hematologist, who would put my blood through a complete checkup.
RO: And would that diagnose uterine cancer?
FD: No. All that would do, among other things, is show a possible hormone imbalance.
RO: Did you suspect uterine cancer at all?
FD: No. At that point I was thinking other things. That’s why I wanted to go to the hematologist, because I said, “Maybe it’s a hematological problem. Or maybe I just have to accept the fact that my body has changed.” But the fact of the matter is, and this is a very important thing for women, you can’t be infantile and just accept what doctors tell you. They’re only human. I didn’t listen to the doctors who said I was okay.
RO: Because you felt intuitively that something was not right.
FD: Yes. So after the hematologist, I went back to my original gynecologist, and I asked her if I needed to go on hormones. She did a tes, and she said, “Maybe your pregesterone is a little bit low. Maybe that’s why you’re starting to bleed in the middle of the month.” She said, “I’m going to put you on progesterone for two weeks out of every month and that should stop the bleeding until you’re supposed to have your period.” So she put me on one pill a day for two weeks, and I called after a couple of months and said, “It’s not working. I’m still staining.” She said, “Take two pills.” Well, my face broke out, and I felt like I was jumping out of my skin. Everything was so irritating to me. So I called the doctor up and said, “This double dose is just not doing it.” And she said, “Go back on the one pill.” And I thought… “This is her answer? ‘Go back on the one pill’? She’d doubled it because the one pill wasn’t working.”
RO: Right. And so, now are you angry?
FD: Yes.
RO: (Laughs) Good. And did you tell her that?
FD: No, I just hung up and said, “I’m never going back to her again.” A girlfriend told me about a woman who’s a gynecologist and a hormone specialist, here in L.A. So I went to see her, and she does her own ultrasound. Now this is probably the third ultrasound that I’ve had done. And she said, “I see a slight thickening of the uterine wall but nothing to be concerned about. Fran, I promise you that you do not have cancer.”
RO: Now, are you feeling comfortable that the fourth or fifth doctor has said you’re healthy?
FD: Well, I kept thinking about Gilda Radner, because I had leg pain and she had leg pain too. A lot of women who have gynecological problems complain about leg pain, and yet there is no recognition in the medical community that there two things are connected. And they are. I f you have any enlargement or cysts or anything that’s pressing on the nerve endings that go up from the leg, you’re going to feel leg pain.
RO: You have leg pain, you’re still staining and the doctor does what?
FD: She put me on birth-control pills, on a very low dose, and almost immediately I started bleeding nonstop. After a week I called her and said, “This can’t be the right treatment.” So she said, “Okay, stop it, come in, and we’ll do a D&C.” She said, “It’s an uncomfortable procedure, but it only takes five minutes. And it’s really just as a precaution.”
RO: Now, when she said she was going to do the D&C, did she tell you that was the test for uterine cancer?
FD: No.
RO: So when you went in for the test, you just thought it was another test
FD: Yes. And let me tell you, this thing that everybody was avoiding giving me took literally three minutes to do. And I went home. It takes three days to get the results.
RO: You’re worried, or not? It’s out of your mind?
FD: No. It’s on my mind. I was home waiting for my karate instructor to come to the house when I got a call from the doctor. And she says, “You know, Fran, I thought about calling you into the office, but then I thought you would only get nervous and why belabor this? Your tests came back positive. I’m so shocked, I can’t even tell you. You have an adenocarcinoma.” And I said, “Wait a minute, let me write this down.” here’s a tip: As soon as they start talking to you about something specific, get a pen and paper. Do not just listen, because your head is reeling. And I’m writing it down, and I say, “Now what is this exactly?” She said, “It’s uterine cancer.” I start to cry. She said, “Oh, Fran, I’m so sorry. Let me just say it’s at a very, very early stage. It is 100 percent curable.” She said she was setting me up with a woman who is a gynecological oncologist and that she’d see me on Thursday. This was a Monday.
RO: You’re alone in the house?
FD: No. Lisa, my karate instructor, had come to the house by then. She was with me for a long time while I called my family. You know I was a victim of a violent crime. I was raped. When that happened I couldn’t call my parents because of the pain I would be giving them. So I called my sister, who called them. But I knew that I needed to handle this pain and misfortune differently. I couldn’t put other people’s feelings above my own, even if it was my parents’. So I called my mom, who I considered to be much more emotional than I am. She was actually very strong. She said, “Okay, let’s not panic. We’ll do whatever has to be done, and we’ll take of it.”
RO: You wanted your mommy.
FD: Yes. And I called Elaine, my agent, who’s kind of a surrogate mother to me. She wanted to know everything. And she said, “I want to come with you to the surgeon.” And I spoke to my sister, who’s a nurse, and my sister said, “First of all, have the D&C done again by the surgeon in the hospital, because you’re going to be working with her now, so let her take her own tests.” When I spoke to her, the surgeon, I said, “Listen, my sister said this, and also I want to see a doctor who’ll give me a colonoscopy.” I remembered that with my aunt, who had had ovarian cancer, it had spread to her bowels, and I was thinking, “God! This is it. They’ve already diagnosed me with having cancer of the uterus, it’s probably already spread to my bowels.” In spite of all my attempts to find out what was wrong with me, it was like a Greek tragedy, because nobody could find what was wrong with me. I completely slipped through the cracks. And I hadn’t gotten the D&C right away because they don’t test women my age for uterine cancer. Most women who get it are older or overweight. But as I’m telling the doctor all this, I’m realizing how mad I am at everybody. At that time, I hated the doctors. When I went in for my test with the surgeon at the hospital, I went with Elaine and my girlfriend Rachel. We all went into the examining room. They had the pads and pens. And everybody asked questions. This is very important? Never do it by yourself.
RO: You need at least another set of ears, because you are not thinking, right?
FD: You’re in way over your head. Have more than one extra person with you, and ask a lot of questions. Don’t think that you can’t take up the doctor’s time. This I your time, and it’s very important. After the D&C, I got a message from the doctor’s nurse saying that the doctor would like me to come to her office before the colonoscopy the next day because she had more information for me.
RO: This is as a result of the test that your sister said you should take.
FD: Right. And I said, “I’m not going to wait until tomorrow morning to find out what this information is.” So the surgeon called me back and said, “I did the test a little differently from the gynecologist. In fact it’s a little more advanced than we thought it was." She said, “It looks to me like what you have is between a grade two and a grade three” – grade three being…
RO: …more aggressive.
FD: Right. So she said, “I’m not going to kid you. We’re going to have to do a complete hysterectomy, and hopefully we’ll get it all.” I hung up the phone, and I started to cry. I really thought that it was over for The Franny.
RO: Did you call your mother and tell her it was worse than expected?
FD: Yes.
RO: Good for you. Now, you had the surgery on what date?
FD: June 21st. The year 2000 – a summer to forget.
RO: Did you talk to the doctor the day that you went under?
FD: Yes. She and a group of people met me in the pre-op, and I asked if my room was ready. I wanted my family and friends to wait in the room – Rachel and Greg, my mom and dad and Elaine. Now, when I had found out that it was a little more serious than I thought, I said to Elaine, “You know we should tell Peter (Fran’s former husband and coproducer of The Nanny).” Because at first we were thinking, “Why upset him?” But then I was afraid that because it was getting more serious it might leak in the press. Elaine called Peter, and he said, “Tell her that I love her very much.” After the surgery, once I’d been home a few days, I called him and said, “I think about you every day,” and he said, “I think about you every hour of every day.” I wept on the phone, and it was a very meaningful conversation.
RO: But you hadn’t really been in close contact with him until then?
FD: I hadn’t talked to him at all since the last day of shooting. I had corresponded with him, but he wouldn’t return my correspondence. He was feeling very hurt, since I choose to end the relationship.
RO: So this was really a healing thing for you two. You’d been a couple since you were kids, in a way, this brought you back together.
FD: Yes.
RO: You came through surgery, and the cancer was not grade three. It ended up not being as bad as the surgeon had thought.
FD: No. There were some grade-three cells, but the majority of it was grade two. If I had waited any longer, though, it would have become more advanced.
RO: Was the doctor who gave you your first test correct in saying the cancer is 100 percent curable?
FD: I have about a 95 to 98 percent cure rate at the level that I caught it.
RO: It hasn’t spread anywhere.
FD: No. And my surgeon showed it to three of her pathologists, and then she said, “We can send this to Johns Hopkins in Maryland.” We did that, and it was the opinion at John Hopkins that I did not need any post-op treatment. I just needed to be on a very strict follow-up program.
RO: What does that mean specifically?
FD: Going to her every three months for the first two years, I think, so they can do test to make sure there’s no evidence of new cancer. And every six months for three years after that. At which point, after five years, they consider you cancer-free. So for five years you sort of pray every time you have to go. Three months comes so fast. I considered radiation and chemotherapy, but after a lot of research and talking to people at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, I decided I didn’t need it.
RO: But you made that decision after doing a lot of research.
FD: Yes. It was so important to do the research. Whatever you do, don’t be passive. If you have cancer, get yourself a Web TV, which costs like $150. Get yourself a printer, which costs about $50. That’s probably the cheapest thing you can do to get on the Internet and have access to the medical information you need. But you know, the other thing is, nobody tells you how long it’s going to take. My doctor certainly didn’t. She said, “In six weeks you’ll be pretty much back to normal.” That was the furthest thing from the truth. What women (I spoke to) said to me over and over again was, “They don’t tell you how long it takes to recover, and I don’t know why this is.” So what happens psychologically is you feel like there’s something wrong with you – you’re not as good, you can’t recover as fast as you’re suppose to. I tried to go back to my old exercise routine, but the people I was working with didn’t know how to deal with post-op cancer patients. Since then, I have found someone who is helping me get back in shape, who has worked with post-op gynecology patients at UCLA.
RO: What about acupuncture?
FD: I also got into that. Five different women, one who had uterine cancer, said to me, “You should go see this person. He’ll put you on special herb teas and a special diet. And he will help you.” So I’ve been seeing him. Also, it’s good to go to therapy, especially if you’ve never done it before. The permanence of what was done to me really hit me. How irrevocable it is, how I will never be able to have a baby.
RO: Did it affect how you felt as a woman?
FD: I’m very happy to say that all my feelings came back, and sexually I’m fully functional and very healthy.
RO: Glad to hear it. Besides your family and friends, have you had a lot of people respond? Did people write you?
FD: Yes. My fans were caring and wonderful, and in fact I wrote a letter that told everybody how I was. And you learn you just have to pick yourself up, brush yourself off and start all over again. It’s always good when you see somebody who has moved on. You look at somebody like me on TV and you think, “Oh, if only I had their life. They don’t have a care in the world.” But you know what? I’m human like everybody else, and I’ve had some pretty hard knocks. And the thing about life is that the more you go through, the more you’re able to cope with. You can say, “I’ve been here before, it hurt, I’ve gotten through it. I know what it’s like to get to the other side and be happy again.”
RO: What’s next for you?
FD: I really don’t know. I have an idea for a sitcom that I think will be really good. I’m writing a screenplay that I’d like to produce and direct. I think I need to be challenged to keep life interesting. I’m at the next mountain I want to climb.
I saw her first on the big screen, in Cadillac Man. She blew me away. Beauty and brawn. Fast and funny. Really funny. Quick enough to spar with Robin Williams. Who was she? Where did she come from?
Queens, it turned out. Not too far from where I grew up. We met on the set of my first film, Car 54, Where Are You? I was scared and clueless. She was calm and generous. She taught me how to hit my mark, and what 12-hour turnaround was. On our days off, we went to museums, debated politics, shared sushi. She took me into her heart and under her wing. The film ended, our friendship flourished. I was welcomed into her family of friends: Peter, Sylvia, Morty, Elaine, Judy, and Donna – each genuine, caring and kind. For the first times since moving to Los Angeles, I felt as if I belonged. Away from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, tucked away in a two-bedroom condo in the Valley. I found an authentic New York home and a true friend.
Ever since, Frannie has been my touchstone, a slice of reality in the land of make-believe. She has been there for me through it all – broken hearts, realized dreams and newfound wishes – offering insight and wisdom along the way. She has taught me many things, most importantly, the joy in the journey.
When I found out Fran had uterine cancer, I cried. Then I called her mom. When I pulled myself together, I called Frannie. She was, as I expected, full of candor and caring, light and love. She took care of me, as I knew she would with her soothing tone and reassuring statistics. I hung up the phone and said aloud, to an empty kitchen, “She is amazing.”
So here is my first magazine cover-story interview. I am thrilled to share my friend Frannie with you, to let you see this woman I feel lucky to know, to love. Let her story inspire us all to be our own health advocates, to trust what we are sure of, to treasure our friends. Thank you, Frannie, for the interview, and so much more. – Rosie
RO: So tell me how it was from the beginning. You were sick for a while before you knew.
FD: I had midmonth staining. Sometimes I’d go for a day or two where it seemed like I’d gotten my period, but it would stop. Then I’d get my period when I was supposed to get it. I also had some cramping occasionally after intercourse, and so I went to my gynecologist.
RO: Now this how long ago?
FD: More than two years ago. And my latest doctor said – and this is about five months ago, when she operated on me – that I had had it for at least two years.
RO: When you went to the first doctor, your gynecologist, what did she say?
FD: She was fine about giving me a checkup or a Pap smear, but she said, “I feel that you’re too young to have a D&C (dilatation and curettage)” – which is a scraping of the uterine tissue. And instead of asking what it was and what would it tell, I was flattered she thought I was too young so I just left it at that.
RO: So you can diagnose uterine cancer through a D&C?
FD: Yes. And the gynecologist essentially made me believe that I was perimenopausal, that this is how menopause starts. Your period don’t go right anymore. And I asked her about the cramping after sex and told her I usually take an Advil. She said anything that one Advil is going to take away is nothing to be concerned about. But I wanted to get a second opinion, so I went to my internist. He said he’d send me to a hematologist, who would put my blood through a complete checkup.
RO: And would that diagnose uterine cancer?
FD: No. All that would do, among other things, is show a possible hormone imbalance.
RO: Did you suspect uterine cancer at all?
FD: No. At that point I was thinking other things. That’s why I wanted to go to the hematologist, because I said, “Maybe it’s a hematological problem. Or maybe I just have to accept the fact that my body has changed.” But the fact of the matter is, and this is a very important thing for women, you can’t be infantile and just accept what doctors tell you. They’re only human. I didn’t listen to the doctors who said I was okay.
RO: Because you felt intuitively that something was not right.
FD: Yes. So after the hematologist, I went back to my original gynecologist, and I asked her if I needed to go on hormones. She did a tes, and she said, “Maybe your pregesterone is a little bit low. Maybe that’s why you’re starting to bleed in the middle of the month.” She said, “I’m going to put you on progesterone for two weeks out of every month and that should stop the bleeding until you’re supposed to have your period.” So she put me on one pill a day for two weeks, and I called after a couple of months and said, “It’s not working. I’m still staining.” She said, “Take two pills.” Well, my face broke out, and I felt like I was jumping out of my skin. Everything was so irritating to me. So I called the doctor up and said, “This double dose is just not doing it.” And she said, “Go back on the one pill.” And I thought… “This is her answer? ‘Go back on the one pill’? She’d doubled it because the one pill wasn’t working.”
RO: Right. And so, now are you angry?
FD: Yes.
RO: (Laughs) Good. And did you tell her that?
FD: No, I just hung up and said, “I’m never going back to her again.” A girlfriend told me about a woman who’s a gynecologist and a hormone specialist, here in L.A. So I went to see her, and she does her own ultrasound. Now this is probably the third ultrasound that I’ve had done. And she said, “I see a slight thickening of the uterine wall but nothing to be concerned about. Fran, I promise you that you do not have cancer.”
RO: Now, are you feeling comfortable that the fourth or fifth doctor has said you’re healthy?
FD: Well, I kept thinking about Gilda Radner, because I had leg pain and she had leg pain too. A lot of women who have gynecological problems complain about leg pain, and yet there is no recognition in the medical community that there two things are connected. And they are. I f you have any enlargement or cysts or anything that’s pressing on the nerve endings that go up from the leg, you’re going to feel leg pain.
RO: You have leg pain, you’re still staining and the doctor does what?
FD: She put me on birth-control pills, on a very low dose, and almost immediately I started bleeding nonstop. After a week I called her and said, “This can’t be the right treatment.” So she said, “Okay, stop it, come in, and we’ll do a D&C.” She said, “It’s an uncomfortable procedure, but it only takes five minutes. And it’s really just as a precaution.”
RO: Now, when she said she was going to do the D&C, did she tell you that was the test for uterine cancer?
FD: No.
RO: So when you went in for the test, you just thought it was another test
FD: Yes. And let me tell you, this thing that everybody was avoiding giving me took literally three minutes to do. And I went home. It takes three days to get the results.
RO: You’re worried, or not? It’s out of your mind?
FD: No. It’s on my mind. I was home waiting for my karate instructor to come to the house when I got a call from the doctor. And she says, “You know, Fran, I thought about calling you into the office, but then I thought you would only get nervous and why belabor this? Your tests came back positive. I’m so shocked, I can’t even tell you. You have an adenocarcinoma.” And I said, “Wait a minute, let me write this down.” here’s a tip: As soon as they start talking to you about something specific, get a pen and paper. Do not just listen, because your head is reeling. And I’m writing it down, and I say, “Now what is this exactly?” She said, “It’s uterine cancer.” I start to cry. She said, “Oh, Fran, I’m so sorry. Let me just say it’s at a very, very early stage. It is 100 percent curable.” She said she was setting me up with a woman who is a gynecological oncologist and that she’d see me on Thursday. This was a Monday.
RO: You’re alone in the house?
FD: No. Lisa, my karate instructor, had come to the house by then. She was with me for a long time while I called my family. You know I was a victim of a violent crime. I was raped. When that happened I couldn’t call my parents because of the pain I would be giving them. So I called my sister, who called them. But I knew that I needed to handle this pain and misfortune differently. I couldn’t put other people’s feelings above my own, even if it was my parents’. So I called my mom, who I considered to be much more emotional than I am. She was actually very strong. She said, “Okay, let’s not panic. We’ll do whatever has to be done, and we’ll take of it.”
RO: You wanted your mommy.
FD: Yes. And I called Elaine, my agent, who’s kind of a surrogate mother to me. She wanted to know everything. And she said, “I want to come with you to the surgeon.” And I spoke to my sister, who’s a nurse, and my sister said, “First of all, have the D&C done again by the surgeon in the hospital, because you’re going to be working with her now, so let her take her own tests.” When I spoke to her, the surgeon, I said, “Listen, my sister said this, and also I want to see a doctor who’ll give me a colonoscopy.” I remembered that with my aunt, who had had ovarian cancer, it had spread to her bowels, and I was thinking, “God! This is it. They’ve already diagnosed me with having cancer of the uterus, it’s probably already spread to my bowels.” In spite of all my attempts to find out what was wrong with me, it was like a Greek tragedy, because nobody could find what was wrong with me. I completely slipped through the cracks. And I hadn’t gotten the D&C right away because they don’t test women my age for uterine cancer. Most women who get it are older or overweight. But as I’m telling the doctor all this, I’m realizing how mad I am at everybody. At that time, I hated the doctors. When I went in for my test with the surgeon at the hospital, I went with Elaine and my girlfriend Rachel. We all went into the examining room. They had the pads and pens. And everybody asked questions. This is very important? Never do it by yourself.
RO: You need at least another set of ears, because you are not thinking, right?
FD: You’re in way over your head. Have more than one extra person with you, and ask a lot of questions. Don’t think that you can’t take up the doctor’s time. This I your time, and it’s very important. After the D&C, I got a message from the doctor’s nurse saying that the doctor would like me to come to her office before the colonoscopy the next day because she had more information for me.
RO: This is as a result of the test that your sister said you should take.
FD: Right. And I said, “I’m not going to wait until tomorrow morning to find out what this information is.” So the surgeon called me back and said, “I did the test a little differently from the gynecologist. In fact it’s a little more advanced than we thought it was." She said, “It looks to me like what you have is between a grade two and a grade three” – grade three being…
RO: …more aggressive.
FD: Right. So she said, “I’m not going to kid you. We’re going to have to do a complete hysterectomy, and hopefully we’ll get it all.” I hung up the phone, and I started to cry. I really thought that it was over for The Franny.
RO: Did you call your mother and tell her it was worse than expected?
FD: Yes.
RO: Good for you. Now, you had the surgery on what date?
FD: June 21st. The year 2000 – a summer to forget.
RO: Did you talk to the doctor the day that you went under?
FD: Yes. She and a group of people met me in the pre-op, and I asked if my room was ready. I wanted my family and friends to wait in the room – Rachel and Greg, my mom and dad and Elaine. Now, when I had found out that it was a little more serious than I thought, I said to Elaine, “You know we should tell Peter (Fran’s former husband and coproducer of The Nanny).” Because at first we were thinking, “Why upset him?” But then I was afraid that because it was getting more serious it might leak in the press. Elaine called Peter, and he said, “Tell her that I love her very much.” After the surgery, once I’d been home a few days, I called him and said, “I think about you every day,” and he said, “I think about you every hour of every day.” I wept on the phone, and it was a very meaningful conversation.
RO: But you hadn’t really been in close contact with him until then?
FD: I hadn’t talked to him at all since the last day of shooting. I had corresponded with him, but he wouldn’t return my correspondence. He was feeling very hurt, since I choose to end the relationship.
RO: So this was really a healing thing for you two. You’d been a couple since you were kids, in a way, this brought you back together.
FD: Yes.
RO: You came through surgery, and the cancer was not grade three. It ended up not being as bad as the surgeon had thought.
FD: No. There were some grade-three cells, but the majority of it was grade two. If I had waited any longer, though, it would have become more advanced.
RO: Was the doctor who gave you your first test correct in saying the cancer is 100 percent curable?
FD: I have about a 95 to 98 percent cure rate at the level that I caught it.
RO: It hasn’t spread anywhere.
FD: No. And my surgeon showed it to three of her pathologists, and then she said, “We can send this to Johns Hopkins in Maryland.” We did that, and it was the opinion at John Hopkins that I did not need any post-op treatment. I just needed to be on a very strict follow-up program.
RO: What does that mean specifically?
FD: Going to her every three months for the first two years, I think, so they can do test to make sure there’s no evidence of new cancer. And every six months for three years after that. At which point, after five years, they consider you cancer-free. So for five years you sort of pray every time you have to go. Three months comes so fast. I considered radiation and chemotherapy, but after a lot of research and talking to people at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, I decided I didn’t need it.
RO: But you made that decision after doing a lot of research.
FD: Yes. It was so important to do the research. Whatever you do, don’t be passive. If you have cancer, get yourself a Web TV, which costs like $150. Get yourself a printer, which costs about $50. That’s probably the cheapest thing you can do to get on the Internet and have access to the medical information you need. But you know, the other thing is, nobody tells you how long it’s going to take. My doctor certainly didn’t. She said, “In six weeks you’ll be pretty much back to normal.” That was the furthest thing from the truth. What women (I spoke to) said to me over and over again was, “They don’t tell you how long it takes to recover, and I don’t know why this is.” So what happens psychologically is you feel like there’s something wrong with you – you’re not as good, you can’t recover as fast as you’re suppose to. I tried to go back to my old exercise routine, but the people I was working with didn’t know how to deal with post-op cancer patients. Since then, I have found someone who is helping me get back in shape, who has worked with post-op gynecology patients at UCLA.
RO: What about acupuncture?
FD: I also got into that. Five different women, one who had uterine cancer, said to me, “You should go see this person. He’ll put you on special herb teas and a special diet. And he will help you.” So I’ve been seeing him. Also, it’s good to go to therapy, especially if you’ve never done it before. The permanence of what was done to me really hit me. How irrevocable it is, how I will never be able to have a baby.
RO: Did it affect how you felt as a woman?
FD: I’m very happy to say that all my feelings came back, and sexually I’m fully functional and very healthy.
RO: Glad to hear it. Besides your family and friends, have you had a lot of people respond? Did people write you?
FD: Yes. My fans were caring and wonderful, and in fact I wrote a letter that told everybody how I was. And you learn you just have to pick yourself up, brush yourself off and start all over again. It’s always good when you see somebody who has moved on. You look at somebody like me on TV and you think, “Oh, if only I had their life. They don’t have a care in the world.” But you know what? I’m human like everybody else, and I’ve had some pretty hard knocks. And the thing about life is that the more you go through, the more you’re able to cope with. You can say, “I’ve been here before, it hurt, I’ve gotten through it. I know what it’s like to get to the other side and be happy again.”
RO: What’s next for you?
FD: I really don’t know. I have an idea for a sitcom that I think will be really good. I’m writing a screenplay that I’d like to produce and direct. I think I need to be challenged to keep life interesting. I’m at the next mountain I want to climb.