Fran Drescher Wants Us to Get Bold About Our Health

In a recent appearance at Healthline’s State of Cancer event, funnywoman Fran Drescher spoke with intensity about her own uterine cancer diagnosis 17 years ago which took “two years and eight doctors” to detect as well as her plea for our nation to shift the focus from just searching for a cancer cure to saving lives through education about prevention, causation and early detection of the disease.

Best known for her TV roles on The Nanny, Happily Divorced and most recently, Broad City, Drescher is equally passionate about being a health activist, a role she has gladly taken on through her bestselling book, Cancer Schmancer, and nonprofit, The Cancer Schmancer Movement. We sat down with Drescher to learn more about her cancer journey, what she has learned about herself in the process as well as her mission to help us “detox our homes.”

When you reflect on what it was like to hear the words “You have cancer” all those years ago what comes to mind? 

It was definitely an odyssey. Once you hear those words, time becomes very strange and you’re almost in a different atmosphere, kind of like swimming under water. The brain gets very cloudy and filled with all kinds of fears. My manager at the time said ‘”Don’t mix imagination with fear. It’s a deadly cocktail.” I tried to stay very present in the moment but sometimes you can’t help but think, “this lovely home that I’m living in, that mascara I haven’t taken out of the package yet, my dog and my friends are going to be here and I feel that I’m disappearing. I’m going to eventually be deleted from the story.” When I started thinking thoughts like that I had to snap the rubber band because I was mixing imagination with fear again.

Were there any bright spots to your diagnosis?

Silver linings started to appear. I realized that I had never been a person that puts myself first, asks for help or accepts the generosity of others easily. I always likened myself to being a superwoman. This was my opportunity to become a more well-rounded person because this leveled me to the ground.

Can you tell us more about the book?

I wrote Cancer Schmancer because I didn’t want what happened to me to happen to others. I was told I had a benign perimenopausal condition because I was “too young and too thin” to have uterine cancer. One doctor told me my stool had changed because I was eating too much spinach. When I mentioned that I had terrible leg pain I was told I had restless leg syndrome and that I should have a gin and tonic before bed. All the while I had cancer but, because I’m a control freak and a producer, I went on to find another doctor. That persistence saved my life. I was lucky that uterine cancer is slow growing. Even after two years, I was still diagnosed as Stage 1.

The book then morphed into The Cancer Schmancer movement.

I started looking at things a different way. I knew that the book was just the beginning of a life mission. I got famous and I got cancer and I lived to talk about it. Turning pain into purpose was extremely healing. It helps make sense of the senseless.

Your mission is to “detox your home” to prevent cancer. What are four quick things you can do that won’t break the bank?

1: Read the label on your toothpaste tube.

Anything you use, put on your body or in your mouth should have been able to be grown in your grandmother’s garden. That’s your barometer for how you should make your choices.

2: Skip cooking with aluminum foil.

You can wrap your food in it and put it in the fridge but don’t cook with it because it releases a noxious fume that’s harmful. Use parchment paper instead.

3: Beware smelly products.

Are you using a super-duper industrial pine cleaner that smells like pine six months after you opened the bottle? Skip it. It’s laden with toxic chemicals that you don’t need.

4: Toss that water bottle.

All this plastic isn’t good for you or the planet. Each year Americans throw out 70 billion plastic water bottles and 17 billion barrels of oil are used to manufacture those bottles. That can fuel a million cars.

As someone known for your sense of humor do you find you can use that to reach people?

I had to write four drafts of my book and back then I was still writing long hand with my Mont Blanc. When I wrote the first draft I was really angry and felt that I had been betrayed by the medical community and by my body. By the time I reached the fourth draft I had found my voice and the funny bone America knows. Very cathartically I began to remember funny things that happened along the way that I hadn’t absorbed. I learned the life lesson that side by side with grief lies joy and sometimes you have to step over that line. You have to seek it out, it’s a little bit more difficult when you’re mired by the depths of despair but it’s there and you just have to force yourself to seek it out.

I read that you never wanted to live a life filled with regret.

That’s a mantra for me. I learned that life lesson very early when I was just starting out as an actress. I had to take the bus to the train to the audition and I got in my way. I got self-conscious, I didn’t do well and I didn’t get it and the whole way home I had so much regret that I said nothing is as bad as this feeling. I’m going to throw myself entirely into everything I do because the feeling of regret is much worse for me. That became the Fran Drescher standard that I live by.