Dave Coulier revealed how much weight he has lost after being diagnosed with HPV-related oropharyngeal tongue cancer.
Coulier, 66, told People on Tuesday, December 2, that he lost 10 pounds because of the discomfort he experiences when eating. He noted that the treatment he is receiving is different from chemotherapy but has its own set of challenges.
“I have a hard time swallowing and speaking,” he said. “I sound like I’m drunk because I slur my words.”
Coulier was originally diagnosed with stage III non-Hodgkin lymphoma in October 2024 after an upper respiratory infection caused severe swelling of his lymph node.
“I went from, I got a little bit of a head cold to I have cancer, and it was pretty overwhelming,” he revealed to People, noting it hadn’t spread to his bone marrow. “At that point, my chances of curable went from something low to [the] 90 percent range. And so that was a great day.”
Coulier’s treatment has been a “constant fight,” he said on a January 2025 episode of his “Full House Rewind” podcast.
“The side effects have side effects,” he said. “And then you take a drug to counteract that and this and that. So it’s this constant cocktail where your body is in fight or flight mode and you’re just trying to adjust to, ‘OK, how am I adjusting to steroids? How am I adjusting to the chemo cocktail?’”
“It’s a little bit of an internal battle,” he added.
Earlier this year, Coulier learned that he was cancer-free. He has since been battling tongue cancer.
“To go through chemotherapy and feel that relief of, ‘Whoa, it’s gone.’ And then to get a test that says, ‘Well now you’ve got another kind of cancer.’ … it is a shock to the system,” he said on the Today show on Tuesday.
Coulier noted that he didn’t exhibit any symptoms or signs before a chance discovery during a follow-up scan confirmed his second cancer diagnosis.
“It was a really tough year, chemotherapy was grueling,” Coulier said. “A couple of months ago, I had a PET scan, and something flared on the scan. The doctor said, ‘We don’t know what it is, but there’s something at the base of your tongue.’”
Coulier’s medical team assured him that “the prognosis is good.”
“They said it could stem from having an HPV virus up to 30 years ago. A lot of people carry the HPV virus, but they said mine activated and turned into a carcinoma,” he explained. “We found it early enough where it’s very treatable. … It’s got a 90 percent curability rate.”
He continued: “It’s a whole different animal than chemo. It doesn’t feel as aggressive, but there are still side effects. My joke usually is … I’m doing really well for a guy with cancer. I get to start the new year saying, ‘I finished radiation yesterday!’ It’s kind of serendipitous.”
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