Nicole Eggert has some tips on the best way to be there for the cancer patients in your life — and there are a few things supporters shouldn’t tell their loved ones.
“I think a lot of times the wrong thing to say is to put your journey on somebody else’s journey,” Eggert, 52, exclusively told Us Weekly on Monday, March 18. “So people will say, ‘Oh, well, by this time my hair was falling out and by this time I became sick.’ And it’s just not the case. Every body is different.”
The Baywatch alum explained that putting ideas into a person’s head while they’re sick isn’t going to help their recovery process especially when they’re already filled with so much “worry” and “anticipation” about their treatment.
“To say to somebody by the fourth week, ‘You’re going to feel terrible,’ or ‘By the second week this is going to happen to you.’ It’s just not true. So you shouldn’t put those things,” Eggert shared. “You really should just listen. I think it’s a lot in life in general, right? Listening is better. Listening and saying, ‘Good for you.’ Giving affirmations and listening is probably the best bet.”
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Earlier this year, Eggert revealed that she was diagnosed with stage 2 cribriform carcinoma breast cancer after she experienced “terrible pain” in her chest in October 2023. However, she could not get in to see a doctor until the following month. In February, Eggert revealed that doctors subsequently found the cancer spread to her lymph nodes.
“I started feeling a bit of a throbbing, [that’s] how I describe it. It sort of [happens] sometimes for me, and I think this happens to some women during my cycle, sometimes my lymph nodes will throb or your ovaries throb a little bit,” she recalled. “It felt like that, but a little bit more intense and it lasted the day. And so I did a self-exam and I could feel a mass. I could feel a lump clearly, and it was devastating because it was right there and I could have felt it sooner and I didn’t, but my body let me know it was there. It definitely had to listen to the signs.”
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Eggert confessed that she did not perform self-examinations and relied solely on her annual doctor visits, mammograms and ultrasounds. Now she wants women to learn from her mistakes.
“I’ll start by saying that a large percentage of women and men have dense breast tissue, and many times things can be missed by mammogram and ultrasound, which was in my case,” she told Us. “So I highly encourage people to do self-exams. That’s just off the bat. You should do regular self-exams, get familiar with what they feel like and when something is different.”
With reporting by Leanne Aciz Stanton
