Jeff Bridges returned to his blog Monday with good news: His cancer is now in remission, nearly 11 months after he revealed his lymphoma diagnosis. And his COVID-19, the disease you didn’t know he contracted back in January? That’s getting better too. Finally.
“Lots has gone down since my last installment,” Bridges revealed in his usual handwritten notes posted on his website. “My cancer is in remission — the 9in by 12in mass has shrunk down to the size of a marble.” That’s progress from when he reported in January that it had “drastically shrunk.”
Unfortunately, that same month, Bridges and his wife, Sue, were exposed to COVID-19 at his chemotherapy infusion center, he announced Monday as he published thoughts from March that he had held back until now.
“Soon after,” Bridges wrote on March 28, they both “share an ambulance to the ICU,” where she spent five days in the hospital, and he, with an immune system weakened by the chemo, was there for five weeks.
“My dance with Covid makes my cancer look like a piece of cake,” he wrote in March, but didn’t publish until now. He said he held back on the entry “until I got a handle on my Covid.” Now, he said, the respiratory illness is in the rearview mirror.
“Covid kicked my ass pretty good, but I’m double-vaccinated & feeling much better now,” the Oscar winner wrote. “I heard that the vaccines can help folks with Long Haulers. Maybe that’s the cause of my quick improvement.”
Bridges gave credit to his physical therapist, Zachary Wermers, with whom he’s been “concentrating on getting me off of the oxygen assistance, which until recently I’ve been needing to walk around. The sound it makes reminds me of Darth Vader.”
But the 71-year-old said he had a goal, which was to walk youngest daughter Hayley down the aisle at her August wedding.
“Thanks to Zach & my terrific medical team I was able to, not only walk Hay down the aisle, but do the father/Bride dance with her WITHOUT OXYGEN,” Bridges wrote.
Actor Jeff Bridges is nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar in ‘Hell or High Water’.
Next stop? The actor says he’s excited to get back to work on the FX/Hulu series ‘The Old Man’, which went on production hiatus shortly after his 2020 cancer diagnosis and is now due out in 2022.
“It’s lookin’ good,” he said of the show, in which he plays the titular “old man” who used to work for CIA agent, now lives off the grid — and is being pursued by an assassin.
