Jeff Bridges: I was ‘pretty close to dying’ from COVID during chemo for cancer
nypost.cominterview with People, the now-healthy 72-year-old said the last year and a half feels like “a bizarre dream” that he wasn’t sure he’d overcome.
It all started when Bridges was doing a home workout and felt something unusual in his stomach. He would be diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.“I had a 12-by-9-inch tumor in my body.
Like a child in my body. It didn’t hurt or anything,” he said, shocked by the doctor’s discovery.He started chemo by infusion, then orally, right away, and the “cocktail” of medicine doctors used “worked fast.”But in January 2021, the chemo had weakened his immune system and the “True Grit” star got COVID at a time when the vaccine was not yet available. “I had no defenses.
That’s what chemo does — it strips you of all your immune system. I had nothing to fight it,” he said. “COVID made my cancer look like nothing.”He would spend the next five months in extreme pain in the hospital, yelling for nurses to help him with oxygen every time he rolled over. “I was pretty close to dying.
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