Former Dancing With the Stars host Samantha Harris is on the road to recovery after receiving her second breast cancer diagnosis in August 2024.
Harris, 51, who was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, told People in an interview published on Tuesday, April 1, that she fosters a healthy mindset. “I think of myself as cancer-free,” she told the outlet, adding that she is feeling “great.”
It comes just seven months after Harris revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time, despite being in remission. “Hey everybody. I have some shocking health news that I never thought in my lifetime again I would have to share, but I have a breast cancer recurrence,” Harris shared via an August 2024 Instagram video. “[We] caught it early. It is very early. It is in the same exact location of my initial breast cancer [diagnosis] 10 years ago.”
In her new interview, Harris revealed that while she was recovering from surgery to remove a cancerous tumor, she did experience a “setback” in November last year. She had been on 10 days of mandated bed rest when she embarked on a walk.
“For most people, that would mean just go walk down the block to the end of your street and come back,” she told the outlet. “I went for two days in a row of [about] an hour of walking, thinking that I was walking at a slow pace — but for me, that’s still an incredibly fast pace.”
Harris explained that two days of exertion led to a “red” and “inflamed” recovery site that scared her into thinking she had taken significant steps backwards. “I was immediately so concerned that I had basically undone all the goodness of the surgery and first 10 days of recovery and now was fearing that I had maybe either an infection or that my implant was being rejected,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what was going on. So, the emotional roller coaster — took that deep dive again.”
As Harris continues her recovery, she added that “the new goal is to make sure that my body is not a host for any circulating tumor cells to decide to settle on a host organ.”
Harris added that her husband, Michael Hess, and two daughters, Josselyn, 17, and Hillary, 14, are helping her discover a new level of normalcy. “You want to get back to normal or whatever the new normal is,” she said. “And so if this could be a blip on the radar of our daughters’ memories, that would make me very happy.”
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