(Rodrigo Vaz/FilmMagic)
By Raechal Leone Shewfelt 21 hours ago Yahoo Celebrity
Fans of "Rhoda" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" rejoiced Wednesday when Valerie Harper announced that she was "cancer-free" in Closer magazine.
Unfortunately, the excitement
was short-lived. Harper, 74, soon after released a statement clarifying her
comments as to how she's really doing since being diagnosed with cancer early
last year.
"In response to a recent
erroneous quote concerning my health, I am not 'absolutely cancer-free,'"
Harper said. “I wish I were. Right now what I am is cautiously optimistic about
my present condition and I have hope for the future."
The actress further described
her condition during a new interview with
Howard Stern on Wednesday to promote her guest arc on the Hallmark series,
"Signed, Sealed, Delivered," which premieres this Saturday.
"In
a nutshell, each eight weeks I have a brain scan — a non-invasive MRI — and
consistently, in a straight line, it's gotten better and better," she told
Stern. "Less cancer."Harper continues to take what she called a
"pulse dose" of medication once a week (rather than every day).
Otherwise, she told Stern,
she feels no physical symptoms.
Although Harper stopped short
of saying she was free of the disease, the considerable improvement in her
health has caused some confusion. How can a woman told she has three months to
live by a doctor suddenly appear to be all better?
Malcolm Schultz, a
psychotherapist with the L.A.-based Cancer Support Community-Benjamin Center, told
Yahoo the cancer patients he's worked with in support groups over the past 31
years know that it’s not so simple in any case of the disease.
"Doctors are using the
'cure' word and the 'remission' word much less and are using the words 'no
evidence of disease' much more, that seems to be the trend,” Schultz noted.
"They're not necessarily saying that there's no disease there. It’s just
that they can’t see it or test for it at this point.”
Harper
explained her situation in much the same way on Stern's Sirius XM radio show:
"They say it's terminal and this is incurable, because they don't have
proof that it's curable."The former "Valerie" star, who had lung
cancer in 2009, revealed in March 2013 that she had been diagnosed in January
with a rare cancer, leptomeningeal carcinomatosis. The sad news followed an
incident while Harper was rehearsing and thought she was having a stroke,
because she couldn't remember her lines and she had numbness in her jaw and
dizziness.
When
Stern asked Harper whether she had brain cancer (as was widely reported), she
quickly said no. "Imagine two pieces of saran wrap with spinal fluid in
between," Harper said. "That's around the brain and up and down the
spine and around the genitals to protect… [so] bacteria and infection don't get
in there..."
Harper added that she only
went public with her diagnosis because there were false reports going around.
The actress credited
"great care and wonderfully researched new medicine" with keeping her
alive.
Though she admitted her
diagnosis was a tough period in her life, she said that now cancer does not
keep her from working at all.
"In
the beginning I cried a lot, I was mourning," Harper revealed. The news
also prompted her to finalize her will and to feel more grateful.
One year later, her
philosophy is simple: "Don't go to a funeral before the day of the
funeral. We're all terminal.”
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