Advocate, Marcia Cross, on Her Battle with Cancer and HPV

Marcia Cross is perhaps best known for her role on Desperate Housewives but she is also an incredible activist for cancer prevention and HPV awareness. Our own Amy Cohen Epstein sits down with the actress for an in-depth and highly personal interview. Here, Marcia Cross discusses her battle with anal cancer, the challenges of motherhood, and the deadly culture of shame surrounding HPV cancers, which kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.

“YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG”

Advocate & actress, Marcia Cross, has a message for everyone struggling with HPV cancer diagnosis

Amy Cohen Epstein: I am so thrilled to be talking to Marcia Cross today. Many of you know her as an actress from her roles in iconic TV shows like Melrose Place, which was absolutely one of my favorites, and Desperate Housewives. But I actually know Marcia through the lens, first and foremost, of being a mother.

What I know about Marcia through those eyeballs is that she is incredibly patient, loving, supportive, and just a joy to watch. There are some parents who act like they know everything and others who are excited to learn what to do and what not to do from other parents.

I would certainly put you in the latter category, which I think is such a sign of your wisdom and also your humility. I think you're incredibly humble in the most beautiful way. I would love to know what were you like as a child, and your childhood, and what you would think back on as your characteristics and traits as a child. Did they foreshadow your life as an adult?

Marcia Cross: It's really hard to say, but I had a really Pollyanna childhood. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts — very homogenous. Certainly not racially diverse and not even economically diverse, really. So there are, of course, downsides to that. The upside was that people were very kind. I had a very Utopian vision of the world, which I had to deal with as an adult.

I lived in a neighborhood where all the doors were open; we were out playing every night. We had neighborhood picnics and it was a very beautiful, lovely, hard-to-come-by childhood. In terms of that playing into now, I would say, I think that I have a lot of anger and rage because of it…. I just thought everybody had integrity and people would look out for each other, and would share. All these qualities that I grew up with, with my parents and my neighbors, I assumed that was the way the world was. So I think if you're a parent, you would think that was great, and as an adult, I can say it's really been an interesting journey. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that the world isn't necessarily all those things.

 So I find that I have to teach my children the opposite. I won't let them walk out the door not knowing how to assess a situation or not assume, like I did, that everybody is good and everybody has the best intentions for you and everybody else. Does that sound really sad, or is that just really wistful?

Amy Cohen Epstein: No, I think it's reality. Life isn't roses and rainbows.

Marcia Cross: Yeah.

Amy Cohen Epstein: I think most people learn that at some point in their life…. I have to imagine when you got to Hollywood, whether physically and just the idea of Hollywood when you got there, that your eyes must've opened pretty quickly —

Marcia Cross: Oh gosh no, it's taken me years.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Really?

Marcia Cross: I always say it's been this last year. I don't really care politically if someone is a Republican or a Democrat. I actually don't even like that there are political parties; I just think it makes for decisiveness. But I would say that these last four years have broken my heart. My anger comes from a broken heart and that heart was instilled in my youth. So it's a long answer to your question, but ...

Amy Cohen Epstein: It's a good one.

Marcia Cross: Yeah.

Amy Cohen Epstein: You have dealt with harsh realities in your very small world, in your family — sickness. Did that have a similar effect on you? And can you tell me that journey?

Marcia Cross: Yeah. So when I was 31, I had been dating a wonderful man, an actor, Richard Jordan, and he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died — I don't know how many months now. I sort of blocked it out but let's say five or six months later. Pretty typical course for glioblastoma multiforme.

At that time, there was no internet. I remember going to the Beverly Hills public library and looking it up and reading that it was terminal. And I would say that broke me in a different way. Not in an idealistic way, but certainly that broke me in the way of anyone who's lost somebody.

My friends all then went off and fell in love and got married and lived their 30s, and I was 31, and it took me a decade to recover. I really could not find my way after that. So, in a way, that was very hard to recover from, and not the same broken heart as the motivation and people's characteristic broken heart, but just like, "Oh my God, one moment you love someone, and the next minute, they're gone." As anyone knows who's been through someone dying, you're forever changed. Forever.

Amy Cohen Epstein: I think it does a number of things. So I grew up not as idealistic as you did in that world. But I still grew up in a very bubbly way, where everything was always safe and okay. And when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I remember her first reaction was, "This isn't the way it's supposed to be. You kids are not supposed to deal with this." She didn't even really talk about herself.

 So when I look back now and having the perspective of age and being not that far away from the age she was when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I think of it as… at that time when I was 16, I thought "But bad things only happen to bad people. Like in movies, the bad guy dies."

Marcia Cross: Right, right.

Amy Cohen Epstein: And she was such a good person to be thrown into the shit that cancer is. Bad things can happen, and it's very real and raw, and your whole world changes in so many ways. Obviously, if there's a silver lining, you realize what's important and what is not. And what's important is your health. I think it's different than the craziness of what's happened in the last few years. But I do think it's just like, you're going down this road and it takes a hard right, and it takes a long time to veer back to the street. But you're not the same person ever again.

Marcia Cross: Ever. Right, exactly.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Not to make this horrible for you, but you've certainly then dealt with, again, your own series of medical hardships, which I have to assume, at a later stage in your life has been a whole different experience.

Marcia Cross: Well, I used to always say to Tom, my husband, how lucky we are. I would just say, "Come on. We're so lucky." He didn't quite have that same wonder that I did like, "Oh my God." I think because he felt like he would get married and he would have children. He never doubted. Whereas I knew that life could change on a dime. I also didn't think I was going to get married so late. Everything was such a gift to me.

 And then when he was diagnosed with throat cancer,, he said, "Oh, now I know what you mean." But until you actually have that experience, you don't know that life can change on a dime and literally never be the same. So, interestingly enough, when that happened, I had been such an uber caretaker for Richard that it never occurred to me that all these years later, I was going to have something happen and go, "Oh my God, I know how to do this."

 You know me. I'm terrible with returning phone calls. I can't write an email. This not my strength. But if something like that, if a crisis is happening, I am your girl. I researched everything, I made a million doctor's appointments around the country. I was like, "Oh, this, I know how to do." It was different, but I did. So it was kind of tragic, but it was an odd thing to have that echo. There wasn't a moment where I was like, this is never going to take us down, love. This could never go to the place where I could imagine losing him. So it was different. Where I was with Richard, it was a terminal diagnosis.

“I THOUGHT IT WAS IMPORTANT THAT I TALK ABOUT IT, BECAUSE I HAD READ ON THE INTERNET SO MANY STORIES OF SO MANY WOMEN AND MEN WHO WERE HIDING DIAGNOSIS, WHO WERE ASHAMED OR LYING ABOUT IT… THAT'S JUST RIDICULOUS. IT'S A CANCER. IT TOOK UP RESIDENCE IN YOUR ANUS. YOU DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG.”

Amy Cohen Epstein: You have become this incredible activist. And that's one my favorite words. To be able to take your own experience that was brutal and use it with a platform to make great change is ... To me, that's just a gift to the world and you've done that. You've just done it in the most sincere outspoken way. Was that natural? Has that part of your life been very conscious?

Marcia Cross: Firstly, you're making me cry, Amy.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Sorry.

Marcia Cross: No, honestly. It wasn't a plan. In fact, if anything, I said, "I don't really want this to be my life: talking about anal cancer." But what happened was, when I got to the other side of it, I thought it was important that I talk about it, because I had read on the internet so many stories of so many women and men who were hiding diagnosis, who were ashamed or lying about it. And I was just, this is where that new England pragmatism comes in, I was like: "That's ridiculous. It's a cancer. It took up residence in your anus. You didn't do anything wrong."

I can't bear for people to suffer for no reason, or much more seriously, die. That's the other thing that happens. They don't want to go to the doctor and say I have something, discomfort or I'm bleeding, whatever they don't want to talk about. They're ashamed. And I just, I couldn't stand that thought, so I thought I'll do this article for People magazine and this little video. And I thought that would be enough.

 And then I realized after it was done, that it didn't really tackle the medical part. So I had a friend of a friend named Jon LaPook with CBS, he's a gastroenterologist. He's the perfect person. So then I sat down to do this interview with him, to really talk about HPV and anal cancer and throat cancer; I did feel like I had a responsibility to educate, because nobody was talking about it, which I just really couldn't understand.

 So I did that, really just because I felt like I had to. That's that young part of me — you have to help. How could you not? And then after there was a couple of days on the internet where I guess there was nastiness and texts about HPV and associating my husband's throat cancer with my anal cancer. You can go where you want with that. And I got really upset, and I remember thinking, "Ah, the hell with everybody. Let them all get cancer. What do I care?" And I got really pissed off.

 And I remember calling my doctor and I was so angry. And he said, "Well, why do you think Michael Douglas isn't talking about it or other people are not talking about it? Because it's not pleasant." And I tell you, that lasted, I swear, 48 hours and then I was like, "Get over it. Put on your big girl underwear and get on with it."

What? Do I not do this because people were making, tweeting little comments? Come on! My God! That just seems so silly to me. At first, I was a little hurt by it — but I'm trying to help you people, you know?

Amy Cohen Epstein: Yes.

Marcia Cross: In fact, there was this one incredible journalist from CNN who wrote ... At first, she wrote me. And she said, "Are you getting paid for this?" Who is going to pay me? And I said, "Not a dime."

And then she wrote an article, which said something to the effect of: Marcia Cross is trying to give everybody a gift. And it was such a beautiful thing to have somebody out there to get that there was nothing in it for me.

Amy Cohen Epstein: You are a selfless human. They do exist.

Marcia Cross: That was beautiful. And then really, like I said, I don't want to make this my life. It's ridiculous. I want to do other things. But there's not a lot of people who talk about it. And so I, just by default ... If it was breast cancer or even ovarian cancer, there's a lot of people out there who have the mantle and are really doing great work.

 But, unfortunately, in this category, that's just not the case. And I have a dear friend that I made who ... We didn't know each other at the time, but she went through it when I did, and she's now started this HPV Alliance. She's doing all those nuts and bolts and has an incredible board of doctors and just amazing people to really help change the whole thing from the ground up.

 In other words like, well, whose department is the anus? When will people be educated about HPV? All of the things that need to be done from the medical side as well as education from the public side. So there's just a lot of work that needs to be done on it, because it really is a virus that is ubiquitous in our society. And now maybe, after this pandemic subsides, people will start to understand that a virus is a virus. It's not because you're a pervert sexually. So that's been the problem, I think. Hopefully, people will start to understand. Most people get it [HPV] and it goes away. For other people, it stays in the body and rears its head when your immune system is weakened. We have to educate ourselves about it. And that way, we can save a lot of lives, because you shouldn't have to die from any of these cancers.

Amy Cohen Epstein: The educational piece is so multifaceted. So the educational piece is not just talking about it to friends and family and people, let's put quotes around that. But it's also the medical community. And educating the medical community, not just about what it is, but how to talk to patients, when to talk to patients, how to explain it and talk about it in a way that resonates with HPV, so you have to talk to parents, you have to talk to young teens.

 And in some places, in some communities in the United States, certainly around the world, it is taboo. So when you start talking about those kind of "topics," it's like, "No, no, no. We don't talk about that. That means there's sex involved and I'm not talking about that because my whatever is too young, or that's not happening." And that's really a hard barrier to break through.

I've been in so many rooms with so many women who are highly educated, Marcia. These are college graduates, a lot who have gone on to more schooling after college, PhDs, high level executives, who look at me when I say that a pap smear doesn't detect ovarian cancer, and their mouth drops open. "What? What do you mean?"

Marcia Cross: Oh my God.

Amy Cohen Epstein: "My doctor always said it did." And I'm like, "What doctor do you go to?" Or, "I never thought to ask." You can sort of expect that in some small groups that I've talked to. But it's amazing when you hear that from women who are the top of their rung in their corporate community and they're highly educated. It's shocking. But then it does remind you, well, why would they know that if no doctor had ever told them?

Marcia Cross: Exactly.

Amy Cohen Epstein: And that's why taking your own experience like you have and saying, "Wait a second. If no one's talking about this, I'm going to, and I'm going to be unafraid of the haters. I'm going to tell them to just fuck off, basically." But I'm going to use my platform to do some real good in the education side on multiple platforms. There's nothing better than you can do with your time.

 The best, most amazing thing you can give to your kids is to say, "You never have to be ashamed of what you've gone through. You just need to take that experience and make it the most positive thing ever. And don't hide from it, because other people can benefit from what you've learned and you've been through and how it's changed your life in so many ways." You've done it just incredibly. As your friend, I'm so proud. I just think it's incredible. It is. And as you said, to you, it might be like, "Of course." But it's not an of course and people don't do that. So the world needs you because you were unafraid.

Marcia Cross: I have so much shame about other things, like dropping the ball. But this? No, we all need to be educated. This is a no brainer to me.

I just want to go back to something you said that I think is amazing: I was one of those women. I never knew that the reason I was getting a pap smear .... I never asked, "Well, what's the pap smear for?" I never heard of HPV. But a pap smear is a test to see, basically, if you have HPV cells that have multiplied in your cervix, right? I'd never heard of it. And even when my husband tested positive, I didn't make the connection, because I'd never had a positive pap smear, which is kind of crazy.

I went to a conference and I spoke about my experience. And I said, "I didn't know what this was. I'm a pretty intelligent woman. Doctors need to say, “This a pap test and this is what it's for.' This is what I'm checking for.'"

Amy Cohen Epstein: It makes 100% sense. And one of the reasons I'll tell you why is that, first of all, men their doctors questions, women don't. So if you're alone with your doctor, particularly your gynecologist, it's sort of a, "I want to get out of here as fast as possible."

Marcia Cross: Exactly. Get that thing out of my vagina. Do your check.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Exactly.

Marcia Cross: Tell me if you have to, but I don't want to sit and talk about it.

Amy Cohen Epstein: No. And the interesting thing, Marcia, is when I do these small educational symposiums with a breast cancer survivor and then a breast oncologist. And if there's 10 women in the room listening, it could go on for hours. The number of questions women will ask the doctor is staggering. There's something about not being alone in an exam room, about having other people sitting with you, and it's not your doctor. So it's almost like a stranger, but an expert.

….That is a barrier that really has to be broken down and it's done by advocates and education.

Marcia Cross: Right. And like you, it did blow my mind that I was going in there ... I was shocked that these things, that to us, the lay people, are so obvious, are invisible to the doctors. You say, "Well, whose department is the anus?" And they look at you like, "What?" "Well, is there a guideline? Are gynecologists supposed to ... "

 They're all kind of dumbfounded. And what was brilliant actually, was the doctors all whispered in my ear, "Thank you so much for doing this." And also, there are things that they can't bring up because every profession has its politics, so you're kind of outside of that. I have no political agenda except to save lives. So it really helps. But like you, I was stunned that I had anything to offer. I thought, "Oh my gosh. Wait, you're the doctors. You're the ... "

Amy Cohen Epstein: You're the experts. You're the smart ones.

Marcia Cross: Exactly. The head spins.

Amy Cohen Epstein: But I think it goes to show that being strong and believing in and standing up for what you believe in and knowing that you have something to say that's important, and then saying it, and then continuing to say it, is a gift. And not that many people have it, and it is a gift. And the fact that you've used your voice in this way is just ... You have saved lives. Marcia, you have saved lives. You will continue to save lives.

Marcia Cross: I hope so. Can I say one thing, Amy, before we wrap it up?

Amy Cohen Epstein: Please, yes.

Marcia Cross: I do want to say that anal cancer on the rise in post-menopausal women. I don't know who your audience is — maybe they're just a little before that — but I just want them not to take their eye off the bal., Because what happens is they tell women or, "Oh, you don't need to go to the doctor anymore, the gyno anymore." I just want to put that little two cents in there to be aware of that. That's all, because it's really important.

Amy Cohen Epstein: It is really important. And I will say, I've had a lot of conversations with post-menopausal women and with a gynecologic oncologist in the room to talk. And they, by far, the answer is, "Oh, I stopped seeing my doctor. I certainly stopped seeing my gynecologist a long time ago, because why would I?"

iIt's money and it's time. It is. And it's women thinking I'm done with that stage of my life, because they equate that doctor's visit to fertility and post fertility. And it's not a doctor that women continue to see throughout their entire lives. And that's not good.

 So I think that is a wonderful, wonderful piece of information, encouraging women to see their doctor. And it's the knowing you're normal. It's what I say, and it applies to just women in general. It's know your normal —

Marcia Cross: And don't take no for an answer.