Melissa Etheridge's anthem of hope

Stone Phillips Anchor • Profile

If anyone can turn a bout with breast cancer into an anthem of hope, it’s Melissa Etheridge. Etheridge is now cancer-free, and feeling stronger than ever. Since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it's the perfect time, we thought, to check in with a survivor who was diagnosed a year ago this month.

Eight months ago, Etheridge talked for the first time about her battle against breast cancer. In a recent interview, she reveals new details about her struggle, including her decision to use a controversial drug to help her get through chemotherapy.

Stone Phillips, anchor: The day you were diagnosed with cancer is not one to celebrate. But it’s been a year. Is this a happy anniversary?

Melissa Etheridge: Happy? Yeah. Happy time to look back and go, “Whoa, look at this year. What a year. My goodness. We can get through anything.”

Phillips: The hair is back.

Etheridge: How ‘bout that?

Last February, she took the stage at the Grammy awards without any of her trademark blonde hair and blew the crowd away.

Her performance was another coming out for the rock star and gay icon. She showed the world that she was also a cancer survivor. She’d just completed 10 agonizing weeks of chemotherapy. And was still getting radiation treatment. Yet, somehow, she summoned the strength to smile and scream.

Three days after that showstopper, at her home in Los Angeles, Etheridge spoke for the first time about the tumor she discovered in the shower last fall, and the treatment that followed. Then, she called it "the closest to death" she's ever been. "The chemotherapy takes you as far down into hell as you’ve ever, ever been."

She said she couldn’t have gotten through it without the woman she calls her wife, actress, Tammy Lynn Michaels.

Etheridge (from interview eight months ago): This one has a gift of humor and comedy.  When I was diagnosed with cancer she’d say, “Well, hello cancer pants!” 

Tammy Lynn Michaels: It’s the truth.

Etheridge:  And when I finally did lose my hair and she’d shaved it and I had a couple of hairs here, what’d you call me?

Michaels: Captain Stubing. Remember from the Love Boat where he just had a couple right down the side and then he was just shiny.

But as they told us back then, there were times during chemotherapy when laughter couldn’t lessen the pain.

Michaels (from interview eight months ago): When it first goes in your body, it makes your eyes get all glassy. And I couldn’t really see in her anymore. So by the time we’d get her home from chemo, I would look at that and know, very soon on, she’s going down again.

Etheridge: There were days upon days where I couldn’t make a sound, where she would tell me she loved me and I couldn’t even tell her that back.

She may not have been able to make a sound, but she wrote a song, called “This is Not Goodbye.” And sitting down with Etheridge again, eight months later, she played it for us.

Etheridge: It was a song that came to me while I was on chemo. I was thinking, “Wow! It’s like every time I was just getting better and I’m starting to come up, I know that in two days I’m going to get that stuff put back in me and I’m going to go away.” Even though I’m in the same room with my loved one, I can’t talk to her, I can’t move, she can’t touch me, it hurts to touch me, and it’s really, really hard, so I wanted to write a song about it. “I know it’s hard for you. But I’ll be back. This not goodbye. I’m not checking out here, at all.”

Phillips: No primal screams, but how good does it feel to be singing that song knowing that you’re nowhere close to goodbye?

Etheridge: Real good.

She was one of some 200,000 American women diagnosed with breast cancer last year. And like so many others, she knows the cancer could return. So, for at least five years, she’ll be taking a daily dose of the anti-cancer drug, Tamoxifen. She’s changed her diet, eating less junk food and is doing her best to cut down on something else: stress. Melissa believes a history of cancer in her family isn’t the only explanation for why she got sick.   

Etheridge: I think I’ve been on a path ever since I was born, a path of high stress.  I put myself, my career, it was a big old juicy carrot right in front of me for all of my life. I started playing in bars when I was eleven.  And I never stopped. Until I was 43 years old, and diagnosed with breast cancer was the first time I canceled everything, and laid in my room for weeks.

It took cancer for Melissa to stop putting her career and a lifetime of pleasing others, ahead of her own well-being.

Etheridge: Cancer’s like the ultimate excuse. Who’s gonna say, “Oh, no, you have to show up for this one?” “Hey, I got cancer.  I can’t be there.” It’s the ultimate eraser.

Phillips: So, the diagnosis instantly vented all that stress?

Etheridge: Oh, yeah.  Instantly.  I mean, it's like you just blow up.  It’s the most stressful thing ever. "Oh, my God. I might die." Phew.

Etheridge: And all those fears that you have of, “If I don’t work this hard, and if I don’t make this, if I don’t do that, oh, I’m gonna what? You’re gonna what? What if something horrible ever happened to me?” Well, something horrible happened to me. And you know what?  My life became very simple. And it cleared up. And I had a completely blank slate and I can build it now the way I want to.

In the life she’s building now, Melissa is making time to speak out and to raise money for the fight against breast cancer.

But there’s one part of her story she has never talked about publicly until now: A controversial choice she made to help with the harsh side effects of chemo.

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