Dave Coulier has a difficult battle ahead, but he is hopeful. The actor, beloved for his role as Joey Gladstone on Full House, has announced that he was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year.
He has stage 3 Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which per the Mayo Clinic, “is a type of cancer that begins in your lymphatic system, which is part of the body’s germ-fighting immune system,” which causes “white blood cells called lymphocytes [to] grow abnormally and can form growths (tumors) throughout the body.”
Speaking with People about his diagnosis and how it came to be, he shared that he was diagnosed last month, after an upper respiratory infection caused major swelling in his lymph nodes.
He was then advised to undergo PET and CT scans after doctors noticed one of the areas increasingly swelling “to the size of a golf ball.”
“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 said.
“I went from, I got a little bit of a head cold to I have cancer, and it was pretty overwhelming,” he added, admitting: “This has been a really fast roller coaster ride of a journey.”
© Getty“When I first got the news, I was stunned, of course, because I didn’t expect it, and then reality settled in and I found myself remarkably calm with whatever the outcome was going to be.”
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Still, he quickly jumped into action, and further shared: “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.”
© GettyDave has been married to wife Melissa Bring since 2014, and he shares son Luc — who will be 34 tomorrow, and is expecting his first child, a son, in March — with ex-wife Jayne Modean, to whom he was married from 1990 to 1992.
© GettyThe Fuller House star added that at the very least, his bone marrow test came back negative, and noted: “At that point, my chances of curable went from something low to 90% range. And so that was a great day.”
He has already started chemotherapy, and though he only disclosed news of his diagnosis now, he already shaved his head some weeks ago as a “preemptive strike.”
“I have my good days. I have my bad days,” he went on, further detailing: “Some days are nauseous and dizzy, and then there’s other days where the steroids kick in, and I feel like I have a ton of energy. I actually skated yesterday with some friends here in Detroit. We just went and skated around and shot pucks, and it was wonderful just to be out there doing something that I love and just trying to stay focused on all the great stuff that I have in my life.”
