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Topics: Celebrity
Jess Hardiman
Actor Jeff Bridges has revealed he was preparing to say goodbye as he battled with Covid-19, saying he had nearly died from the disease which hit him like a ‘tonne of bricks’.
The 72-year-old was hit with Covid shortly after finishing chemotherapy to remove a ‘nine by 12 inch mass’ from his stomach, saying his immune system was ‘totally stripped’.
Bridges admitted his journey with non-Hodgkin lymphoma was ‘nothing’ compared to his battle with the respiratory virus, which saw him hospitalised for six weeks.
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Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he recalled: "When the pandemic broke out I went up to Montana with my wife.
"I was doing some exercises and I was feeling something in my stomach that feels odd - like a bone where bone shouldn't be.
"My wife says, 'You ought to get that checked out', but I said, 'No, it doesn't hurt'.
"We go to Montana for three months, have a wonderful time - no pain or anything like that.
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"My legs itched and I had night sweats, but I thought that was because it was hot at night.
"It turns out both of those are symptoms of this lymphoma that I had.
"Then I come back ready to get back to work, and in a couple of weeks I go, 'I'd better get this thing checked out'.”
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It turned out he had a large mass in his stomach, but that doctors couldn’t figure out what kind of lymphoma it was.
"They don't operate on these things, you do chemo,” Bridges continued, saying they ‘finally found a cocktail that made the thing shrink in chemo’ and that he felt ‘so excited’.
"Came home, January sixth. Turned on the TV and saw the whole insurrection going on and then opened a letter from the treatment place saying that I'd been exposed to Covid - what a day, man.
"Sure enough I got Covid and the Covid proved to make my cancer seem like nothing, because my immune system from the chemo was just totally stripped."
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Bridges said the whole thing left him in ‘surrender mode’, adding: "Covid hit me like a tonne of bricks... the breathing... it was very tough.
"My wife got Covid too, we shared an ambulance to the hospital. She was there for five days, I was there for, like, six weeks.
"I wasn't saying goodbyes, but I was kind of prepping myself... the doctors were saying, 'You've got to fight, Jeff', but I couldn't understand what that meant.
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"I was in surrender mode, because we're all gonna die and I said, 'This might be it. I'm trying to dig the experience as best I can'."
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