Fran Drescher Takes Us Inside Her Two-Year, Eight-Doctor Cancer Diagnosis (EXCLUSIVE)

This is so sad and scary. In an exclusive interview with Closer Weekly, The Nanny alum Fran Drescher opened up about her battle with cancer as she teamed up with Healthlineto be part of their State of Cancer event in NYC last week.

"I went down this two-year, eight-doctor odyssey, to get a proper diagnosis of uterine cancer — I kept slipping through the cracks. I wasn't what I thought I refer to today as a 'medical consumer.' I was, however, not complacent and was proactive and didn't think that I was being diagnosed properly," she shared. "I didn't think that the hormone replacements I was being given by many of those doctors were helping me, and in fact, some of it was exacerbating my symptoms, and so I kind of just kept trying to find someone else and repeating the same story of the symptoms — I just don't know what's happening, but it doesn't feel normal and ultimately, I got diagnosed with a test that doctor No. 1 said I was too young for."

She continued, "If it were today, I would make sure I understood what the test would determine and whether we should do the test and eliminate the more potentially life-threatening concerns before treating me for the more benign disease that was not life-threatening. Many, many western doctors subscribe to the philosophy, 'If you hear galloping, don't look for a zebra because it's probably a horse.' Yet, if you happen to be a zebra like I was, you're going to slip through the cracks — and this is what I tell people all the time, particularly women with gynecologic cancers, because many women at the earliest, most curable stage (what I call the 'whisper stage') — those very subtle symptoms are identical to other problems that are not very benign, really. I was misdiagnosed for a condition I did not have."

Fran was so excited to partner with Healthline for something so near and dear to her. "When they reached out to me, saying they thought it was a nice fit, I was extremely interested and excited — and by the way, honored — because it fortifies my positioning as someone that is constantly reaching out to people with new portals or points of view of how to deal with health across all pathways of social media."