In 1986, actress Jill Eikenberry completed the pilot for a new television show - L.A. Law. She and her husband, actor Michael Tucker, felt excited about the prospects for the show. They planned to leave their home in New York and move to Los Angeles if NBC accepted the pilot.
Suddenly their rosy future turned dark. In May, Eikenberry’s doctor told her she had breast cancer.
“The news came completely out of the blue,” Eikenberry told me. “At first, I thought that I was going to die and that was it. I spent some time just lying on the bed and crying, unable to imagine how my family was going to get along without me.”
Husband Michael Tucker was scared, too. “I remember the moment when the doctor said, ‘It’s malignant.’ I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought I was going to lose her.” But Tucker and Eikenberry gave each other strength. “Michael and I just held each other for a long time. That helped,” Eikenberry says.
Then several days after learning the diagnosis, Eikenberry went to the screening of a film she’d recently done. One of the other actresses from the film was there, and when the young woman saw Eikenberry, she asked if something was wrong.
“I spilled it all out to her,” Eikenberry says. “And she took me over to her mother who was there, too. When her mother heard the story, she grabbed me and dragged me into the ladies’ room. She hiked up her blouse and said, ‘Look, this is eleven years ago. I have a scar here and that’s all I have to remind me of the breast cancer. This, too, can happen to you.’
“It was the first time I ever had any sense that there was hope, that I might not die,” Eikenberry says. “Her words gave me the courage to seek a second opinion. The first doctor had told me a mastectomy was the best idea, but the second physician said no, I was a good candidate for a lumpectomy.”
So Eikenberry opted to have the lumpectomy, a less radical procedure. The operation was successful, but treatment wasn’t finished. When Eikenberry began filming the regular episodes of L.A Law, she left the set every day at 3:30 P.M. to go to UCLA Medical Center for radiation treatment.
“She was exhausted,” Tucker says. “After she got home, she’d rest for the rest of the night, and then go back to work the next day. And this is how we did the first three or four episodes of L.A. Law.”
Eikenberry told me how it was for her. “I just had to keep on keeping on,” she said. “And today everybody says, ‘Oh, that must have been so hard for you.’ And it was. But if you have something else you have to do, it helps. Continuing to work was very therapeutic. I was also playing the Ann Kelsey role, which was so strong and aggressive and confident. I think that really helped me make it through. Today, I’m celebrating my fifth anniversary cancer-free.
“Once you’ve fought something like cancer and won, there’s not much that’s scary. I used to be scared of flying, but I’m not anymore. After cancer, you’ve seen the thing that we all spend a lot of time denying. You’ve looked death in the face. So fear plays much less of a role in my life than it used to.”
Jill Eikenberry kept on keeping on and discovered that change and setbacks really can make you stronger.
- Erik Olesen