The 73-year-old actress, who played the iconic Rhoda Morgenstern on TV, says she may have as little as three months to live.
The iconic actress was given a prognosis of three months to live by doctors.
In the days before her shocking diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, Valerie Harper was struggling with lines she'd spoken countless times before.
It was early January, and the beloved sitcom star who played wise-cracking Rhoda Morgenstern on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was in rehearsals for the national tour of Looped.
"She was having problems remembering her lines," said Matthew Lombardo, the playwright of the acclaimed Broadway show that led to her 2010 Tony nomination for best actress.
"We thought, ‘That's strange. How can she not remember?’ She knew the play inside and out. I wrote it for her. She just didn't seem like herself."
Soon, the mystery symptoms were too much to ignore.
Valerie Harper (top left) starred alongside (clockwise) Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Ted Knight, Mary Tyler Moore and Gavin McLeod on 'Mary Tyler Moore.'
"Her speech started to slur one day. With that, everyone agreed it was probably best she go to the hospital," he recalled. "We were maybe in denial before that. We love her so much. We didn't want to admit anything was wrong."
A few days later on Jan. 15, doctors told the four-time Emmy winner she had leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare and swiftly lethal condition that occurs when cancer cells spread into the fluid-filled membrane surrounding the brain, People magazine first reported Wednesday.
Doctors estimate she has about three months to live, Harper told the magazine.
"I was stunned," Harper, 73, said of the diagnosis. "And in the next minute I thought, 'This could draw more attention to cancer research.'"
Harper played Mary Tyler Moore's best friend on-screen.
Still, the actress took some time to privately process the news.
When she appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" Jan. 21 to promote her new memoir "I, Rhoda," she discussed her hospitalization in New York but kept her inoperable cancer a secret.
"(I) was rehearsing away, and then it was as if I had Novocaine," she told the morning news show. "I thought, 'What the heck is happening to me?'"
Harper starred in the 'Mary Tyler Moore Show' spin-off 'Rhoda.'
"On GMA, she wasn't ready to talk about it yet. There was still hope for treatment," he said. "She thought she might be able to go back to Los Angeles and get some treatment to prolong her life. No one wants to be told they only have a few months to live."
Throughout those difficult days, Harper maintained her brave and selfless spirit, he said.
"(Looped's) director Rob Ruggiero and I went to see her in the hospital and got a little choked up. It was devastating. But she said, 'You know what? I'm not dead yet,'" he recalled. "She said, 'No, no, stop. We're going to enjoy me and our time together as long as I'm still here.' She was consoling the people around her. She's such a selfless den mother."
Collected from :http://www.nydailynews.com
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