Dave Coulier opens up 1-on-1 about cancer battle

FOX 2 - Dave Coulier has been making us laugh for decades, from stand-up to "Full House" to "Fuller House."  But in November, our friend and Michigan native got the shocking news that he had stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

After months of grueling chemotherapy, he was declared cancer-free this past spring. And now, five months later, he's sitting down with Jay Towers to share his journey.

Jay Towers: "How have you been?"

Dave Coulier: "Oh I've been fine (laughs). I'm good, it's all good, man."

Towers: "I always say that you're my first interview in Detroit in 1999 on the radio, that you came into the studio. It wasn't a phone interview. And to meet you in person, you were always so great. You've never changed."

Coulier: Hey I'm from St. Clair Shores, Michigan and the best part of my journey has been that I got to stay level with all of my friends. So when I was doing 'Full House' in the middle of Hollywood at Warner Brothers Studios, I got to bring everybody along for the ride and they would just say, 'This is your life?' and I would say, 'Yeah, can you believe it?' and so I never wanted to lose that. I never wanted to lose that grounded feeling, so thanks for saying that."

Towers: "Think about in your career how many times you were asked Dave, 'Can you come to our benefit?' 'Can you do our charity event?' 'Can you say a couple words, can you make people laugh? We're trying to raise a little money for charity.' To be on the opposite side, to be on the side of now you're battling, did it give you a different perspective going through it?"

Coulier: "Well, when you see the light at the end of the tunnel and you realize 
it's not a train coming at you, it gives you a different perspective. And so I have had a long journey watching cancer. I lost my sister and my mom and my niece. I really got a peek at what people go through.

"And so you never think the C word is going to be applied to you. And when it does, it's a sobering moment."

Dave's wife, Melissa, who co-founded the wellness company Live Well, Lead Well, jumped in immediately to overhaul his diet, focus on holistic healing, and make sure he was strong enough to battle what was ahead.

Coulier: "Well, you know, you really get to see who you marry when you go 
through cancer. She was unbelievable. I mean, she took care of me around the clock, 
went to every chemotherapy session, which is six hours of sitting there, driving me there, driving me to doctor appointments, making sure my nutrition was good.

"She even made me one of those old man pill cases, the plastic ones, you know, with the pills are all labeled. So she would mark things on the calendar, and you know, when I would have leg cramps, she was rubbing my legs, and I saw the effect it was having on her. 

"You know, I knew I was getting drained going through this process, but I could see how it was affecting her, and that, I think it's harder for the people around you than it is, you know for you.

"Because you're trying to power through it, and you can't kind of ... propel that other person. They're going through it on a similar but different path and that's what really stuck with me was how incredible she was through this entire journey."

After his sixth round of chemotherapy, Dave became dangerously ill and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Coulier: "Something that we didn't foresee, like, you know, when you're done with your sixth chemo treatment, you're going to be fine. You're going walk away and it's 
going to gone and then I got really sick and we didn't know what it was and ended up in, you now, basically ICU for five days trying to figure out what this was and so that was kind of the end of the journey was the toughest.

"You hear from other patients, they say they have to kill you in order to save your life and that's kind of what they're doing. They're killing bad cells, you know, and they take some good cells with you at the same time."

Towers: "You're always working and for the years that I've known you, there's always a project there's always something going on. I would think for anybody that's motivated and does stuff and doesn't sit around was it tough to sit around?"

Coulier: "It was. Cancer kind of takes your life force away from you as you're 
trying to battle through this. You've only got so much energy and stamina and I just kind of felt like a candle that was burning lower and lower. And it was really tough to not be able to, I had creative ideas - I just couldn't act on them. I couldn't go and I couldn't write, I couldn t get myself out of bed and it was pathetic.

"You know, I looked at this guy in the mirror and I said who is this guy who's not being productive with the swollen face, with the swollen stomach and I didn't recognize myself. So psychologically, there are a lot of hurdles that you have to overcome with this as well. There's the physical, there's the psychological and there's emotional. And so it's, you know, you kind of get the hat-trick of things that come at you, and I couldn't have had more support."

Towers: "When you think about friendship today, you have a lot of friends. You have the outer rim of friends, which is like the world, who loves you, maybe you've never met them, but feel like they know you. And then you have the inner circle of, you have your John Stamos friends, you have friends in Detroit. How important is that?"

Coulier: "Well, it's incredibly important and you realize that these people are 
phenomenal, when they're so willing to, you know, give you warmth and love. And John Stamos and Jeff Franklin who created 'Full House,' they flew into Michigan together and then John stayed with us for a week, caught Covid while he was with us.

"So he's sitting at one end of our house on the floor and I'm sitting at the other into the house on the floor, and we're FaceTiming each other, and that was John's trip, yeah. It's incredibly important to, I guess, surround yourself with people who love you."

Towers: "Are you skating again?"

Coulier: "I've skated twice now. That was the goal, that was the barometer. It was, you know, I set the bar of, okay, if I can get back to playing hockey and playing golf, that's gonna be, and I went back and I played twice, and I suck. I was so bad and so slow, so it's gonna take some time, but I just love being out there. And to me, that's a signal that your body is coming back."

Towers: "For anybody that watches this interview, what do you say to the person that just got diagnosed and is afraid?"

Coulier: "Well, everybody's on a different journey. You will hear a thousand different things that people experience when they're going through chemo or radiation or 
different treatments. You have to just really look for the glass being half full and you really have to look for positives in your life because you will get through it. Even though it seems insurmountable, you'll get through and I think if you have the support of friends and family and people in your life, use them, because they want to help you and you may think you're a burden, but you're really not.

"It's harder for them to kind of know how to approach you and how to speak with you because it's a tough subject for a lot of people. So I think if you can keep laughing that's really important."

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