Back in 2020, amidst [deep sight] all that, the world was hit with yet more bad news: Jeff Bridges had cancer. At the time he made the news public, he was cautiously optimistic. By the following year, after chemotherapy, the disease had gone into remission…only for him to catch COVID. But he soldiered on and in a new interview, he says the tumor he contracted is all but gone.
Bridges spoke about his health — and many other things, as he’s described as a “talker” — with AARP. He recalled the early days of 2020, before his show The Old Man went on pandemic break, and how he was “doing those fight scenes for the first episode” unaware that he “had a 9-by-12-inch tumor in my body.”
That sizeable tumor? Now it’s not so big. He says it’s shrunk “to the size of a marble.”
COVID recovery, as he’s discussed before, was very difficult, due to his cancer treatment. “I had no immune system to fight it. Chemo had wiped that out, which made it really, really tough,” he recalled. “For me, cancer was nothing compared to the Covid.”
Bridges wound up spending five months in the hospital recovering from his COVID bout.
“I couldn’t understand how you’d fight it. So I fought by surrendering, which is not the same as giving up,” Bridges said. “What I really felt at the time was love. Love was certainly magnified for me during this time. Not only from the people around me, but also the love in my own heart for them. So what I did was more like giving in to love, you know?”
Luckily he had a cheerleader. “My wife Sue was my absolute champion,” he declared. Sue, too, caught COVID at the same time, but she was only in the hospital for a week. She returned to monitor his recovery. “She really fought to keep me off a ventilator,” he says. “I didn’t want to be on it, and the doctors didn’t necessarily want that. But Sue was adamant.”
And now he’s feeling well again, and is off shooting Season 2 of The Old Man. Like the Dude, Jeff Bridges abides.
(Via AARP)