Jeff Bridges is a cancer survivor after battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2020. But he didn't notice the signs at first. He never would have guessed he had cancer.
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"I'm feeling great now," Bridges said during a panel, per Entertainment Weekly. "What is so bizarre, to me anyway, in the first season when I was doing these fight scenes, I had a 9-inch by 12-inch tumor in my body, in my stomach, that didn't hurt at all. So that's surprising to me."
The actor was doing a panel for his show The Old Man. Doctors ended up diagnosing him with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2020. He was on a pandemic-mandated break from filming the show. The actor realized something was wrong when he felt something hard in his stomach. He figured he should get it checked out.
"I was doing some exercises while on the ground and felt what seemed like a bone in my stomach. I thought to myself, 'Hmm.' But it didn't hurt or anything. I asked [wife] Sue what she thought. She said: 'I don't know, but you've got to get it checked out.'" Bridges said during an interview with AARP magazine in 2023.
Jeff Bridges Talks Cancer
There were signs before that. He just didn't recognize it. Bridges thought he just had dry skin. "I'm hiking and feeling great," he continued. "My shins really itch, and I think, 'Oh, I just got, you know, dry skin.' Then I had night sweats, but thought, 'That's just hot summer nights.' It turns out those are lymphoma symptoms."
Bridges said that his tumor never hurt despite it being there. "You'd think that would have hurt or something, when they were punching me and stuff," he told the publication. "It didn't."
After finding out about cancer and undergoing chemo, Bridges caught COVID. He said that he almost died from the disease due to how low his immune system was at the time.
"Shortly after finding out that good news, I got a letter from the treatment center where I was getting my chemo, and they told me that there was a possibility that I had been exposed to COVID," Bridges told Fox News Digital at the time. "That meant me being in the hospital for five weeks, very close to, you know, kicking the bucket. I mean, I was very sick."
