In a touching new article in AARP Magazine, Jeff Bridges speaks candidly about his battle with lymphoma, which he revealed in 2020, and a subsequent battle with COVID-19.
Bridges recalls being on pandemic hiatus from filming his FX show The old man when he noticed something was wrong. “I was doing some exercises while I was on the ground and felt what felt like a bone in my stomach. I thought to myself, Hmm. But it didn’t hurt or anything,” he explained, so he postponed the doctor’s appointment.
He later found out he had lymphoma and a 9 x 12-inch cancerous tumor near his stomach.
While being treated with chemotherapy, his immune system was suppressed and he contracted COVID. “Cancer was nothing compared to COVID,” the actor recalled, explaining that he spent five weeks in the hospital.
“I was in surrender mode,” he admitted. “I would say to myself, ‘Everybody dies and I die.'”
He explained, “I fought by surrendering, which is not the same as giving up… What I really felt at that time was love. … So what I did was more like giving in to love , do you know?”
Bridges said that after leaving the hospital, he set “really small goals.”
“At first they would say, ‘How long can you last?’ For a while, my record was 45 seconds before I collapsed. And then they said, ‘Oh, look, you’re standing for a second! That’s so cool, now you can walk five feet?'” he recalls.
He achieved a goal of walking his daughter Hayley down the aisle in August 2021; that September, he announced that his cancer was in remission.
Bridges, fearing he would never work again, returned to finish the shoot The old man in October 2021 and called it “like a dream”.
The mass in his stomach is now the size of “a marble,” Bridges said, and he is about to begin work on Season 2 of the spy drama.
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