Kassie DePaiva, who is set to reprise her One Life to Live character, Blair Cramer, on General Hospital this month, has been opening up about her battles with cancer.
The soap star appeared on Stephanie Sloane and Mara Levinsky’s Dishing the Digest podcast, where she talked about her diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia in 2016, which was followed a year later by a breast cancer diagnosis.
“I went to a country jamboree up at Hunter Mountain, and I’m sitting on a chair lift. I feel under my arm, I go, ‘That’s weird.’ I felt two knots. So I thought, ‘Hmmm.’ And they weren’t painful. I know I didn’t feel bad, nothing,” she shared, explaining that she was on a scheduling break from Days of Our Lives at the time.
She continued, “I called and set up an appointment with my doctor and said, ‘Okay, coming back in July. Can you fit me in because I have these little knots? I just want to make sure everything’s okay.’ Well, did a biopsy, and you know the rest is history.”
While she expected a breast cancer diagnosis, DePaiva instead found out she had leukemia. “I did get breast cancer a year later,” she added. “I laugh and am like, ‘Can you believe it?’ But I had a lumpectomy, and everything was clear, and so right now, as it stands, I’m cancer-free and happy.”
She went on to describe the chemotherapy, describing it as “yucky” and “just so awful for your body.”
“It’s not day to day; it’s minute to minute,” DePaiva explained. “You know, you think, ‘Okay, I’m gonna be good,’ and then you get up and all of a sudden your body eliminates… I mean, it was, are you faint or are you gonna throw up?”
“It’s just yucky, and you just think, ‘This is never gonna end,’ and then it does, and then you go, ‘Did I go through with that?’ I cannot believe it,” she added. “And that’s kind of where I am now with, like, ‘I can’t believe the journey,’ but I’m grateful.”
DePaiva, who recently returned to Days of Our Lives as Eve Donovan, is set to return to General Hospital for a brief stint in September. She previously had a short guest role on the hospital drama in 2022 as part of a multi-month crossover event with One Life to Live.
General Hospital, Weekdays, ABC
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
