Christian LeBlanc, the actor who has played Michael Baldwin on the soap opera The Young and The Restless for 20 years, revealed that he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a common blood cancer, back in June.
He also thanked the show’s fans for helping him diagnose the disease.
“The fans [of *The Young and The Restless*] caught it,” LeBlanc told WWL-TV in New Orleans. “I was getting people [telling him], like, ‘Your eye is a little Jim Carrey that way.’”
“There was a tumor right here,” he stated while pointing towards the space between his eyebrows, “pressing on my optic nerve.”
“I went in [to the studio] and they put my wedding ring on – [characters] Lauren and Michael’s wedding ring – and I put my hand down and the ring fell off without friction and I thought what an odd thing,” LeBlanc recollected. “My nose started bleeding on set, [the left eye] kind of got a little wonky, and there was a tumor in the sinus cavity.”
LeBlanc went to a neurological ophthalmologist, who eventually found a tumor in his sinus cavity.
“I’d never spent a day in the hospital in my 65 years until this year,” LeBlanc stated. “It’s a very fast cancer and that is the danger of it, but it’s also because the speed of which a cell reproduces is a signifier of cancer. It also makes it very obvious that it’s a cancer and easily attacked and easily spotted once you get in there.”
When his surgery was done, LeBlanc stayed in the hospital and underwent immunotherapy treatment. As a result of the treatment, the soap opera star lost weight.
“They said, ‘Eat like it’s your job,'” he mentioned. “I lost 35 pounds in two months. Not in a good way, but when they said, ‘Eat like it’s your job,’ I said, ‘I was raised to fulfill this promise.'”
LeBlanc confirmed that his cancer is in remission and that he would be seen on the show’s upcoming Thanksgiving episode airing on November 23.
He is currently working alongside two organizations, The Little Big Cup and the Cancer Support Community (CSC), in order to assist other cancer patients in need.
“When they called me up, I’m thinking of medical support, but what these people do is all the surrounding things that happen to you when you’re diagnosed with something like this,” LeBlanc stated. “So it’s about how to mentally deal with it, how financially you might cope with some of the expenses being out of work and all these amazing things.”
