Ice-T

“When I found out I had high blood pressure, I had gone to the doctor with something totally unrelated. When people become successful, for whatever reason, they start overindulging. You indulge and your diet changes, your sleep changes. Everything that you can do wrong to your body you start doing. It’s kind of the opposite of what you’d think. You’d think that if you’re doing well, you’ll treat yourself well. In fact, it’s just the opposite. You start do to well, you start to treat yourself badly. Read More »

Mike Ditka

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“You take life for granted until you come face to face with the reality that you’re not going to be around forever. I thought to myself, ‘I’m Iron Mike. I’m invincible. I’m never going to have a health problem.’ But then, I had one.“In 1988, I had a heart attack. I’m very thankful to my assistant coaches for realizing that there was something serious going on that day so that I was able to get to the hospital. I think I handle pain pretty well, and this was pretty bad. You can’t describe the feeling. It’s like your chest is in a vice, but it’s a suffocating feeling and you can’t do anything about it.

“But then, after a while, I forgot about it, and went back to thinking that I was invincible again. Well, I wasn’t.

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Dominique Wilkins

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I probably should have known that I was diabetic early on because my dad died of diabetes and my grandfather died of diabetes. Several people in my family now are diabetic. In fact, I didn’t realize it until after I retired, but I’d had symptoms for a long time. After games, I would feel off. I would sweat really badly, I would feel sick, and I would have to eat something really quickly. I didn’t realize that my blood sugar was low.

After I retired, I was again feeling badly. I wasn’t sick, but I was feeling off. I went to the doctor, and he said, “We have some good news and some bad news. Read More »

Jon Lester

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“Being diagnosed with cancer felt surreal. I was in the emergency room, just trying to get some back pain under control. The doctor came in and said, ‘You have lymphoma.’ Really, he wasn’t in a position to say that. He was an ER doctor, not an oncologist. He wasn’t actually sure what was going on. I had some enlarged lymph nodes, but it could have been caused by some other things. So, I spent a couple of days at home in Seattle, flew back to Boston to get some tests done, and found out that it really was lymphoma. But as I said, it was one of those surreal things where it doesn’t sink in until you really start getting treatment and losing your hair and feeling tired all the time. That’s when you start to really understand what type of disease this is and how bad it can be. Read More »

Jim Calhoun

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When I first learned I had skin cancer, just like everybody else, I was a little bit nervous. That “C” word is not anybody’s favorite word, and understandably so. The first time it was in my face, and it was squamous cell, which was a small, self-contained cell, right in my cheek. The doctors were going to take it out, and quite frankly, it didn’t seem like that big a deal at the time. I was still a little bit nervous, obviously, because of the word “cancer”, but the word “contained” was a much better word. And that situation was resolved rather quickly.

The second time, however, was entirely different. The doctors told me that the squamous cell that was contained had somehow or other ended up in my lymph node on my neck, and at the end of the 2008 season, I started to feel something…a bump…in my neck, and this little internal pimple or bump started to grow…and grow…and grow. After about three weeks, I went back to the doctor and he said it was nothing, just an inflamed lymph node, he was pretty sure, and he didn’t think it was going to be a big problem. Read More »

Meredith Baxter

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“My battle with breast cancer actually started five years before I was diagnosed. In 1994, I played the lead role in the true story of Joyce Wadler. She was a New York journalist who had breast cancer. When she was diagnosed, she was ferocious. She didn’t have a sobby, ‘Feel sorry for me’ attitude. She was stronger, she said, ‘Hey, what’s going on? How do I deal with this? Don’t patronize me! Talk to me! Give me some answers!’

“What I didn’t expect, playing that role, was that it was a bit of a guide for later, when in 1999 I, myself, was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was kind of in a fog myself, so the only way I knew to act was how Joyce had behaved. That really did help me. Read More »

Naomi Judd

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I was first diagnosed with Hepatitis C in 1990. My daughter Wynonna and I were cruising through life with the top down, with sold-out coliseums, number-one singles, multi-platinum albums, and six Grammy Awards. Our life was beyond anybody’s wildest expectations of a fantasy.

Unfortunately, I knew something was wrong with me because I just didn’t feel like myself – and before this, I’d always been incredibly healthy. But when you have Hep C, you have this panoply of symptoms that are non-specific. You feel like you’ve got the flu. You get depressed, and maybe display a low-grade temperature. You just feel crummy, like you don’t want to get off the couch. You’re not really in pain, but you just want to give up because you can’t imagine living like this every day.

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Jerome Bettis

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Winning the Super Bowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers in my hometown of Detroit was one of the greatest thrills of my life, but dealing everyday with asthma has been one of my greatest challenges.

I was diagnosed with asthma when I was 14. Initially I thought that with asthma, I couldn’t be involved in any sports or other activities. Thankfully, my mother encouraged me, instead of discouraging me, to play. She said, “The doctor says that as long as you take your medicine, you will be fine.”

The biggest challenge with playing football and having asthma is that it is something I had to deal with during every single play. Asthma was that big fast linebacker I had to deal with all of the time. I had to manage and monitor myself to make sure that I was in the right condition in order to be able to play. But that became a tougher and tougher task as I got older. Read More »

Len Dawson

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In 1991, I came home late on Sunday evening from broadcasting a football game and my wife said, “I want you to read an article about Senator Robert Dole’s cancer. He had surgery to remove his prostate gland, and he found out about this problem through a new blood test called a PSA [prostate specific antigen test]. Read the article.”

So, I read it and told her, “I’m glad he’s doing well, but what’s this got to do with me?” I had none of the symptoms mentioned in the article. Read More »

Marcia Gay Harden

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My advocacy work with breast cancer started as character research for the movie Rails and Ties, with Kevin Bacon. I began researching a character who had undergone a mastectomy and had Stage Four breast cancer. A few women— cancer survivors—were brought to set who had had mastectomies so that I could meet them and understand what they had gone through. Meeting these women was pretty transformative for me and helped me realize what a problem breast cancer is. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer every year, so in portraying these women in some of my movies, it’s a chance to bring real issues like breast cancer to the consciousness of America.

I hope through my acting to illuminate human conditions and promote a kind of healing. My job as an advocate is to encourage women to get mammograms, because prevention is the first step. Cancer affects us all, and it doesn’t know color, creed, finances, or background. It’s really been a pleasure for me to be able to speak out and talk about the importance of prevention. Read More »

Mark Spitz

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Winning my first gold medal as an individual – the 200-meter butterfly in Munich – was my most memorable Olympic moment. I’d worked so hard from, supposedly, my lack of success from the games the time before, that I knew I didn’t have to second guess whether I trained enough, whether I rested enough, or whether or not I was healthy. It was all systems go. Every day after that was a build up to winning the 7 gold medals. So, it was winning my first individual gold medal, and the journey that I took over those 8 days in Munich, that were my most memorable Olympic moments.

About 20 years ago, when I was 38, I discovered that I had high cholesterol. My mother had high cholesterol, but she didn’t do anything about it, and most people didn’t understand that having high cholesterol was one of the leading causes of cardiac disease, which is a major cause of heart attacks. Read More »

Bruce Jenner

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There were so many great moments during my Olympic journey. First, making it on the team in 1972…coming out of absolutely nowhere…was the biggest thrill of my life. Four years later, in 1976, it was a totally different deal. When I broke the world record for the decathlon in Munich, I was the most satisfied person in the world because I just accomplished everything in my sport that I could possibly accomplish. And not too many athletes can walk away from their career feeling that way.

As a youngster I had attention deficit disorder, and dyslexia. And it was very difficult as a young kid. We put so much pressure on young people to perform in school, to read well, and get good grades. That wasn’t happening for me. I failed 2nd grade, and I suffered from terrible low self-esteem. I thought all of the kids were smarter than me, better readers. My biggest fear was to go to school as a young kid because I was afraid that the teacher was going to ask me to read in front of the class. Read More »

Greg Louganis

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When I was first diagnosed in 1988, the same year as the Seoul Summer Olympics, HIV was thought of as a death sentence, so I was going to do the honorable thing and go back home, lock myself in my house and wait to die. Because that was the mentality during that time. And then my cousin – who was my doctor and who did the HIV test – he really encouraged me to stay in training. He said that was probably the healthiest thing for me to do for myself. And I was very thankful for that, because I was able to focus on my diving, which was very positive, rather than on this cloud that potentially loomed over my head. Secrets are devastating, they can really isolate you, and that’s what happened with all of these secrets about my sexuality, and also about treatment, about my illness, about HIV.

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Deborah Gibson

All of my older sisters were taking piano lessons and singing, and I got my start basically by bugging my parents at age four. They kept telling me I was too young, and that maybe I should wait until I was six or seven. But eventually they gave in when they saw I was learning songs by ear.

From age five through sixteen I started doing a ton of theater, which led to voiceovers. That led to my fascination with recording studios, and suddenly I was composing and arranging the music in my head. At age 12, my mom came home from work to find me with my sister’s tape recorders lined up on the ironing board with my little synthesizer. I was doing my own version of multi-track recording, layering all the parts of the music while I played each part back.

When my mom saw that, she took out a loan and set up a recording studio for me in our house, where I worked on my own music for four years. By the time I arrived at Atlantic Records, I already had 100 finished demos and original songs. They couldn’t believe it. But I knew music! I knew how I wanted my music to sound. It was a matter of convincing them that I knew it – obviously the best way to do that is to have a number one hit! But being the youngest person ever to write, produce, and sing a number one hit song brought a lot of pressure. Read More »

Jerry Mathers

Having diabetes came as a big shock to me. When I finished “Leave it to Beaver”, I went to a regular high school. I did a little acting…Lassie, My Three Sons…but I pretty much withdrew from the acting profession. I came back to it later in life, and appeared on a new show called “The New Leave it to Beaver” which I did for 10 years…102 episodes…and those were long hours. I had a fairly young family at the time, two daughters and a son. And, I’d be away from the house for 12-14 hours a day. So when I finished that show I said…”You know, I’m gonna retire now, this is the good life.” I started eating way too much, and not doing a lot of exercise. I put on about 45 or 50 pounds. When I was getting ready to turn 50, a good friend who is a doctor cajoled me into get checked. I finally went in, and she asked me if I wanted to see my kids get married and hold my grandbabies. I said…of course! That’s when she told me that if I didn’t do something about my high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, I’d be dead in three to five years. Read More »