Days of Our Lives actress Kassie DePaiva has spoken about her health struggles after she was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after battling leukaemia.
DePaiva, now 62, said she was initially diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia in July 2016 after returning to her role as Eve Donovan on Days of Our Lives.
“I went to a country jamboree up at Hunter Mountain and I’m sitting on a chair lift… I feel under my arm, I go, ‘That’s weird.’ I felt two knots. So I thought, ‘Hmmm.’ And they weren’t painful. I know I didn’t feel bad, nothing,” DePaiva said in the latest episode of the Dishing with Digest podcast.
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“I called and set up an appointment with my doctor and said, ‘Okay, coming back in July. Can you fit me in because I have these little knots? I just want to make sure everything’s okay.’ Well, did a biopsy, and you know the rest is history.”
She originally thought the lumps were breast cancer, but they turned out to be acute myeloid leukaemia instead.
According to The Leukaemia Foundation, Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is “a type of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow.
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“AML is not a single disease,” says the foundation, “It is the name given to a group of leukaemias that develop in the myeloid cell line in the bone marrow. Myeloid cells are red blood cells, platelets and all white blood cells excluding lymphocytes.”
However, in a cruel twist of fate, her initial prediction would end up becoming true. Just one year after her leukaemia diagnosis, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I laugh and am like, ‘Can you believe it?’ But I had a lumpectomy and everything was clear and so right now, as it stands, I’m cancer free and happy,” she revealed.
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The actress also shared with the hosts of the podcast Stephanie Sloane and Mara Levinsky what it’s really like to go through chemotherapy.
“I was explaining how chemo is just so awful for your body and how it’s not day to day, it’s minute to minute,” she said
“You know, you think, ‘Okay, I’m gonna be good,’ and then you get up and all of a sudden your body eliminates… I mean it was, are you faint or are you gonna throw up?
“It’s just yucky and you just think, ‘This is never gonna end,’ and then it does and then you go, ‘Did I go through with that?’ I cannot believe it, and that’s kind of where I am now with, like, ‘I can’t believe the journey,’ but I’m grateful,” she said.