Dave Coulier revealed he is undergoing treatment for tongue cancer less than a year after beating non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Coulier, 66, shared his latest health update during a Tuesday, December 2, interview on the Today show. “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, explaining that he was diagnosed with HPV-related oropharyngeal tongue cancer in October.
The actor 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.’”
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After a biopsy, Coulier’s doctor confirmed the health issue.
“It was very painful. It’s like if you bit your tongue, but the pain just lasted every single day,” he explained. “They said it’s totally unrelated to my non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This is a new cancer. … I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Coulier initially announced in November 2024 that he had a stage III non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis.
“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 at the time, calling the cancer “very aggressive” but 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 recalled how he told his former Full House cast members the news, saying, “I didn’t want them to hear it from someone else, so I sent a text message out. It was just this outpouring of, ‘I will be there. You just name the time, and I know you’re in great hands with [wife Melissa Bring], but what can we do?’ It really is overwhelming the love that we have for each other. We’ve been there for so many years for each other, and it’s pretty remarkable.”
Earlier this year, Coulier announced he was officially cancer-free. He is now battling early stage P16 carcinoma, which is also known as oropharyngeal tongue cancer.
According to the American Cancer Society, P16 is a protein that’s a marker for HPV, or human papillomavirus. A P16-positive cancer is caused by infection with HPV-16, which is a type of high-risk HPV. (The National Cancer Institute reported that HPV-16 is transmitted sexually, and long-lasting infection can cause changes in the cells that can become cancer.)
“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,” Coulier explained. “We found it early enough where it’s very treatable. … It’s got a 90 percent curability rate.”
Coulier’s medical team assured him that “the prognosis is good,” with him adding, “But we’re going to start radiation immediately.” He is currently undergoing radiation therapy, which entails 35 total treatments for five days a week until the end of the year.
“It’s a whole different animal than chemo. It doesn’t feel as aggressive, but there are still side effects,” he said of symptoms including nausea, “radiation brain” and pain on the left side of his face and tongue. “That’s not 100 percent healed yet.”
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He continued, “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.”
While reflecting on the health scare, Coulier opened up about how his mental health has been affected.
“It’s emotional. It’s psychologically draining. It’s also a big drain to my wife, Melissa, which is the biggest drain on me, seeing how this affects her,” he added. “[I remain] cautiously optimistic. I’m going to get on the other side of this. The silver lining here is that I had cancer, which helped me detect my other cancer. It seems crazy to be making that statement, but it’s true.”
He concluded: “Had I not gone in and listened to my doctors and made sure that I got that PET scan to follow up, we would have never found this carcinoma … and I could be in a world of hurt. This could have progressed immensely, and I would be in trouble.”
