Hollywood star Dave Coulier has shared a harrowing experience amid a long health battle. The Full House star was diagnosed with cancer in November 2024, and admitted that the disease left him hours from death in a recent scare.
Dave, 65, who played Joey Gladstone in the iconic sitcom, is battling Stage 3 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The actor is undergoing chemotherapy to battle the cancer, and revealed that the chemo itself left him so weak that a cold almost killed him had he been ill for a further 48 hours.
Speaking to his Full House co-stars Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber, Dave shared that he was hospitalised for days during the terrifying time, until tests later revealed that he was only suffering from rhinovirus – the most frequent cause of the common cold.
Dave recalled: “My blood levels were so low, because after chemo treatment your red blood cells dive. All your levels – your white blood cells, everything – just your immune system just kind of crashes. And so I caught a cold during that last chemo treatment, and I didn’t get out of bed for 10 days. So I ended up in hospital for four days while they administered an IV of antibiotics, waiting for my fever to break.”
The How I Met Your Mother star explained that his severe symptoms were confusing even the medical professionals, sharing: “And they said, ‘Look, we don’t know what’s going on.’ At that point my body started secreting these proteins that were indicative of a massive heart attack.
“‘We don’t know what’s going on but we don’t think you’ve had a heart attack event. And on the fifth day they finally said, ‘Your fever’s gone, you can go home.’”
While Dave was given the all-clear to go home after his stay, he admitted that things could have gone in a different direction. “But they said, “Had you waited another 48 hours with this, we could have lost you,”‘ Dave described.
Dave said that his wife, Melissa Bring, was the one who saved his life by encouraging to go to hospital. Melissa herself recently spoke about how Dave is coping with his diagnosis, and explained how he tried to stay in high spirits throughout.
“He has some really tough days, and as the chemo has been accumulating it gets a little tougher and more difficult,” she said in January.
Melissa added: “He has such a positive attitude, and you need that in order to really fight it. Every morning, if he’s feeling up for it, we try to put on a song and do a little dance party with the dogs, because when you do feel good, you have to celebrate that too.”
Dave’s determination to stay strong throughout comes after he admitted to his initial struggle back when he announced his diagnosis on The Today Show.
At the time, he said: “It’s been a rollercoaster ride for sure.” Describing the moment doctors told him he had cancer as a “gut punch,” he said doctors told him they had “biopsied it, taken it out, and said, ‘We wish we had better news for you but you have B cell lymphoma, we need to get you into chemotherapy right away.'”
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