Shortly after completing his final round of chemotherapy, Dave Coulier – who was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma in October – was hospitalized with a virus that doctors feared could have taken his life if not caught in time.
“I started to get pretty sick,” the “Full House” alum, 65, told Parade in a new interview. “I didn’t know that I had caught a virus. I was in bed for about 10 days just trying to figure out, ‘Do I have a cold? Am I just feeling the ramifications of this cumulative effect of the chemo? What is going on?’”
“There’s a thing called [ground-glass opacity (GGO)]. On a scan, in your lungs it looks like particles of glass,” Coulier, who starred as Joey Gladstone in the beloved TV series in the 1980s and 1990s, explained.
That, plus his cold symptoms, were “wreaking havoc in my system,” he said. Coulier said his doctors told him that if had not come in for a check-up when he did, “We might not have been able to turn this around.”
Coulier also shared that halfway through his treatment, his doctors told him that they didn’t see any more cancer cells, explaining, “They carpet-bombed me for three more treatments after that, and they’re not expecting to see anything [further].”
Despite the positive news, his wife Melissa shared that the couple still had conversations about what would happen if the treatment didn’t work.
“After [the fifth round of] chemo, he was like, ‘I don’t know if I could do this again,’” Melissa said. “He was like, ‘I’m prepared either way. If I die, I die. And if I can stay here, great. I want to.’ Those conversations were obviously so tough.”
In November, Coulier announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The actor and comedian said he was diagnosed in October after experiencing an upper respiratory infection caused by major swelling in his lymph nodes.
“Three days later, my doctors called me back, and they said, ‘We wish we had better news for you, but you have non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and it’s called B cell, and it’s very aggressive,'” he told People magazine.
“I went from, ‘I got a little bit of a head cold’ to ‘I have cancer,’ and it was pretty overwhelming,” he added. “This has been a really fast roller-coaster ride of a journey.”
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According to the American Cancer Society, B-cell lymphoma is a type of cancer that develops in B-lymphocytes. B-cell lymphomas account for the vast majority of non-Hodgkin lymphomas. Every year, more than 80,000 Americans are diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
“The first thing I said to them was, ‘Wait a minute — cancer?’” Coulier later shared on the “Today” show. “(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.”
Coulier completed his sixth round of chemotherapy last month.
“I was in such a daze when I walked out of the hospital, my wife looked at me [when] we got in the car, and she goes, ‘We forgot to ring the bell,'” Coulier told Parade.
Though to be expected, the treatment took an emotional and physical toll on the beloved actor.
‘FULL HOUSE’ STAR DAVE COULIER DIAGNOSED WITH ‘VERY AGGRESSIVE’ CANCER
“The symptoms were getting worse and worse with each treatment,” Coulier said. “So neuropathy, which I hadn’t experienced before, started to increase. Nausea started to increase. Dizziness started to increase. They call it chemo brain, where you’re a bit foggy — that started to increase. My days of being able to get up and walk around and be active started to decrease.”
“Some days, I just didn’t want to do anything,” Coulier added. “Though I wanted to move around and go out and, you know, work around the house, I just couldn’t. There was so much cancer-related fatigue that got progressively worse and worse and worse, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is how it’s going to go.’”
Despite the setbacks, Coulier and Melissa remain positive and even participate in silly morning rituals that helped boost his confidence.
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“He has some really tough days, and as the chemo has been accumulating it gets a little tougher and more difficult,” Melissa said during an interview with Detroit’s ABC-WXYZ in January.
“He has such a positive attitude, and you need that in order to really fight it,” she continued. “Every morning, if he’s feeling up for it, we try to put on a song and do a little dance party with the dogs, because when you do feel good, you have to celebrate that, too.”
“He has had a lot of loss in his life when it comes to having to deal with cancer. He lost his mother, his sister, his niece. His other sister had it,” she added. “I think for him, he takes every stride and really pulls strength from seeing the women that were so close in his life to powering through it, and he just wants to honor them.”
