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Abby Lee Miller Reveals She’s Cancer-Free After Year-Long Battle: ‘Burkitt Lymphoma’s Gone’
She’s telling all. Dance Moms star Abby Lee Miller got real about her cancer diagnosis in an interview with Us Weekly and the 52-year-old gave fans a real look at her struggle and recovery — even showing off her spinal scar.
Happily, the dance coach revealed her cancer disappeared, a result of 10 rounds of chemotherapy after her diagnosis. “The cancer’s gone,” she gushed to the outlet. “Burkitt lymphoma’s gone.”
“I had a PET scan, and it was cleared. Not one cell of cancer after three rounds of chemo,” she explained. “But I still had seven more just for safety, which was stupid. I should have just worked on therapy.” For Abby, therapy includes having to learn to walk again.
“If the ER doctor wouldn’t have said, ‘Oh, go home and take it easy for 10 days. You’ll be fine,’ then they would have actually tested me and done an MRI and looked further at the blood labs. Then they would have known there was something really dramatically wrong,” she detailed about her emergency spinal surgery. “They could have done something, and they would have started the chemo immediately and … the mass of the infection would have never gotten strong enough to choke my spinal cord, and I wouldn’t be in a wheelchair and I’d be walking.”
The coach is grateful — and hasn’t questioned a thing, including whether or not her diagnosis might return. “I haven’t asked that. I would be afraid to ask that, but I don’t think it’s that kind of a cancer,” she revealed. “It’s a lymphoma, but it’s not … It’s like this weird, strange, bizarre thing that happens, and it’s gone and we need to move on.”
She’s also just ready to get back to her normal grind. “I feel OK. I want to go back to the weight I was when I got out of prison,” she explained. “I want to get back on track and get back to my life in Los Angeles. And I want to sell these TV shows.”
Abby is planning to have a knee replacement in June, which her physical therapist thinks will help her walk again — so things are looking up yet again for the dance lover.
“I always thought I would die of cancer because my mom and my dad both died of cancer. My dad died of osteocancer and my mom died of colon cancer,” she revealed. “But I just never thought it would happen this soon and this fast and this ugly.”
Thankfully, things are on the upswing. You go, girl.
