Actress Kassie DePaiva has been open about her fight against leukemia back in 2016, but now, the soap opera star is opening up about another health scare she had the following year.
DePaiva is best known for the characters she has portrayed on popular soap operas, including “One Life to Live,” “Days of Our Lives” and “General Hospital.” Now, on the podcast “Dishing with Digest,” DePaiva is opening up about her health, including how she discovered she had leukemia and what happened the following year.
On the podcast, DePaiva explained, “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.” Even though she “didn’t feel bad,” DePaiva decided to call her doctor and make an appointment to have the knots checked out.
It turned out that the knots were not breast cancer, but a biopsy revealed that they were acute myeloid leukemia. However, that was far from the end of the story.
In 2017, DePaiva got breast cancer, but she revealed the good news that she is “cancer free and happy” today. She explained, “I did get breast cancer a year later. 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.”
The journey to becoming cancer free wasn’t an easy one. DePaiva shared how difficult chemotherapy was for her. She explained, “chemo is just so awful for your body and how it’s not day to day, it’s minute to minute.” She continued, “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?”
She would have times when she thought, “This is never gonna end.” Yet, it did, and that leaves her thinking, “Did I go through with that?” Today, she is feeling great and also incredibly “grateful.” She explained, “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.”
