Young & Restless’ Michelle Stafford recently made an appearance on the Soapy podcast, which is hosted by Greg Rikaart and Rebecca Budig. In the podcast, Stafford, who plays Phyllis on Young and Restless, opened up about perhaps the most difficult time of her life, her brain tumor diagnosis.
Michelle Stafford reveals she found out about her brain tumor at age 19
Young and Restless star Michelle Stafford made a recent appearance on the Soapy podcast and spoke to Days of Our Lives‘ Greg Rikaart and The Bold and the Beautiful‘s Rebecca Budig. The conversation started out breezy, but Stafford soon opened up about possibly the most challenging time of her life.
“I had a brain tumor,” Stafford revealed. She was only 19 when she found this out. This meant that her entire career in the industry was at stake because of this diagnosis. “But I had it taken out,” she added with a reassuring note.
But the timing of the tumor was difficult for Stafford as she was just starting out as a model at the time. “When I found out it was a brain tumor,” she revealed, “the thing that upset me the most was getting my hair shaved off. I’m 19, and I wanted to model, and this was going to not work out for me well, I felt.”
“I had my priorities,” she laughed, “I mean, I had a brain tumor!”
However, she felt confident that she could beat it from the very start. “I [felt], ‘It’ll be fine,” she revealed with optimism, “My parents, everybody around me was tripping out. I’m like, ‘Oh we’ll just take it out. We’ll just cut it out. They’ll just open my brain.’ Like, they had to take my face off.”
The actress further detailed what happened. “We had three doctors in there,” she continued, “We had the brain surgeon, the ophthalmologist, because they were going to cut through things that I could possibly be blind in my left eye, and then they had to take my face off and put it back on.”
The hosts reacted with shock at that time. Stafford laughed about this, too.
But the experience was still extremely difficult, despite the innate optimism. “I remember when I was being wheeled down,” she confessed, “and I remember the feeling of going, ‘Nothing will ever be this hard.’ I just thought, ‘Nothing will ever be this bad. Nothing in my life from here on out will ever be this bad.’ But that’s not true. There would be worse things.”
It was also difficult for Stafford after the surgery. “I had this kind of weird [thought process], ‘I gotta jump out of planes. I gotta just fly to Italy and see what happens,” she said of her reaction after the surgery. The journey ultimately brought her to soap opera stardom.
Stafford remains one of the most popular soap opera actresses active right now.
Originally reported by Sourav Chakraborty on ComingSoon.
