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Celebrity Health: Fran Drescher America's favorite 'Nanny' is now trying to change the way the medical world treats women's cancers 
On Sept. 11, 2001, Fran Drescher sat in front of the television in her beachside Los Angeles home, watching the devastation at the World Trade Center. For the native New Yorker, the tragedy in her hometown came as she was still recovering from the uterine cancer she had been diagnosed with the previous year. Crushed by what she was seeing, Drescher happened to turn away from the TV to look out the window, towards the Pacific Ocean. "I saw dolphins joyfully leaping in the water," Drescher says in her distinctive Queens accent. "And I thought, 'You know, this is divine intervention.' It made me understand that side by side, with pain lies joy, and we must always seek that out, even in the darkest of times, even when you're told you have cancer. That kind of became a life lesson for me, one that I share with other people that are going through a serious trial, because you've got to look out the window sometimes." Indeed, Drescher, best known for her wisecracking title character on the popular sitcom "The Nanny," had already started looking out the window even before she saw the dolphins on that September morning. At the time she was writing a book, "Cancer Schmancer" (Warner Books, 2002), that would chronicle her experience as a patient and survivor of the disease. Its success would transform Drescher from another small-screen diva into a down-to-earth spokesperson and advocate for those afflicted with women's cancers. Last year Drescher made her work official by establishing the Cancer Schmancer Movement, dedicated to the quest to make women's cancers curable via early detection. Drescher's cancer had been found only after eight doctors had misdiagnosed her over the course of the two years, with an emergency hysterectomy finally arresting the disease. One of her goals is to make sure that no one else needlessly suffers that fate. "Everybody felt like I was perimenopausal, because only one out of four women with uterine cancer happen to be young and thin, as I was," Drescher says. "The average woman with uterine cancer is post-menopausal and/or obese. So because only 25 percent, which I don't think is such a small number, who get it are considered atypical, I slipped through the cracks. And that's me - someone who has excellent health care and is pretty savvy. What about the woman who is uninsured or underinsured or for whom English is not her first language?" Through "Cancer Schmancer," Drescher strives to not only educate the medical industry on the modern needs of their potential patients, but also the potential patients themselves. She wants women to know what she calls the "early-warning whispers" that could be signs of serious problems, and to be proactive when it comes to their health care. It's all about, as she puts it, "empowering people ... transforming patients into medical consumers, to become better partners with your physicians - giving women the sense that they have to put their health care as a priority." What's more, Drescher also wants women to get out of the mindset that they shouldn't complain if they don't feel good, for the sake of those around them. "[Women] are the caregivers to the children, the spouse and the elders in almost every home worldwide. And at all costs, they must keep themselves alive, just like the woman on the plane who's instructed to put her breathing mask on before her child. We must let go of the Victorian sensibility that says, 'If you can grin and bear it, do so, because your family comes first.' When you put your family first, you're really putting them last, because you're useless to them if you're six feet under." Since "Cancer Schmancer" was published more than six years ago, Drescher's crusade to spread the word about women's cancers has taken her across the country several times over. "I'll talk to women from Park Avenue to Beverly Hills and they hear what I have to say, and jaws drop because they realize how ignorant they are about their own bodies." Her journey has also taken her to the hallowed halls of government and, now, beyond the borders of the U.S. as one of its representatives. Last year Drescher was named a public envoy for the State Department, charged with helping to improve America's image overseas. And when she took her first official trip last fall, spending several days in Eastern Europe, Drescher kept her message focused on the health of the female citizens in the nations she visited, including Hungary, Romania and Kosovo. 
"I think that they're very interested in knowing what the early-warning whispers and the tests that are available," says Drescher of the people she encountered during her recent travels. She also took the time to meet with local female celebrities who also had dealt with cancer to impart the importance of using their fame to publicly help in the fight against the disease. "It's their responsibility to come out of the closet, to bring it forward," she says. "It's my job as an U.S. diplomat and a celebrity and a survivor to make them see how important it is to take celebrity and turn it into something that's greater than any individual. This is a very Americanized concept, but one of the great expectations about success in this country is to use it through philanthropy, and it's almost frowned upon if you come across somebody who has been blessed with the good fortune of success that doesn't somehow help someone less fortunate, whether it be animals or the environment, children, women, men, families - whatever. There's so much to be done." Drescher's immediate goal is to get as much done as possible. Even as her entertainment career proceeds apace (she has co-written a romantic comedy screenplay and will soon publish a children's book), she is also getting ready for her next trip as an envoy, this time to the Middle East, where she plans to speak out on the rights of women and the role that volatile issue has when it comes to medical issues. ("There are some nations there where it's very difficult for a woman to go to a gynecologist because it goes against the marriage vows to have a man look at her down there," Drescher states bluntly. "But that only means that it's important that there are more female physicians, which goes in concert with my desire to create a more female-friendly society.") And notwithstanding the snickers that resulted when Drescher expressed interest in taking over for Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate, the actress is seriously considering an attempt to take her show to Capitol Hill on a permanent basis. "Women's health is not my own platform," says Drescher, who would run for the House or Senate out of the Big Apple. "I speak out very passionately on civil liberties and children, and education is a huge thing for me, because really, whatever's wrong in the world has to do with ignorance, and I think that there really isn't enough money spent on educating our young. But everything I put my name to, I like to do really well. I'm a little bit of an overachiever that way, and I never want to disappoint anyone." As long as Drescher continues to speak out on the issues that she is passionate about, she knows she won't be disappointing herself. At age 51 and with more than seven years of wellness already behind her, she is confident of the good she has done, and is eager to keep looking out of the windows that come her way. "I'm not glad I had cancer," Drescher says with candor, "and I don't wish it on anyone, but I am better for it. It's one of those life-changing experiences that I've managed to turn into a positive in a way. When you do turn pain into purpose and you help people and you make a difference, it really is healing and helps to make sense out of the senseless. So that's where I am with that, and I feel that I got fame as I got cancer, and I lived to talk about it. So I'm talking!" |
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