Dave Coulier was doing OK with his chemotherapy for Stage 3 cancer, it seems — until he got knocked out by a common cold.
“I started to get pretty sick,” the actor-comedian tells 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?’”
Turns out the “Full House” and “Fuller House” veteran, whose immune system has been compromised by the cancer and its treatment, had a problem with his lungs. Ground-glass opacities — a sign that’s common in COVID-19 patients — showed up on his scans. He said the condition that caused the opacities could have killed him if his wife hadn’t sent him for a checkup.
Even with that problem addressed, Coulier was still in lousy shape, because the chemo side effects got worse as he progressed toward his sixth round.
“Neuropathy, which I hadn’t experienced before, started to increase,” he said. “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.”
Fatigue from multiple rounds of chemo had him bedridden at his Michigan home by February, the month he finished them up. Now he has no hair but a growing number of hats, he joked.
Coulier was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma last October and went public with it in November after undergoing three surgeries and his first round of chemo.
His diagnosis came after he caught an upper respiratory infection and his lymph nodes swelled like crazy. A node in his groin swelled to the size of a golf ball, so he asked his doctors to take it out and biopsy it. The results came back malignant.
He summoned some levity during a November “Today” appearance, telling Hoda Kotb his current best joke was that in four short weeks he had “gone from a Virgo to a Cancer.”
“I’ve tried to retain a sense of reality but also a sense of humor about it,” he said.
At the time of his “Today” appearance, Coulier had lost only “a little bit of hair” but managed to pull off a close-cropped buzz cut.
Months later, in Parade’s photos, he was completely bald — but had a big ol’ smile on his face.
Former Times staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report.
