LOVE SAVED HIS LIFE
How Marilu Henner and her hubby overcame the ultimate relationship test — his cancer diagnosis
MARILU Henner admits she wasn’t above playing the “Taxi” card if it got her boyfriend a date with a top cancer surgeon.
But the surgeon barely glanced at Michael Brown’s chart before announcing his plan: He’d remove Brown’s bladder and prostate, and — to prevent erectile dysfunction — run a hose up his penis that the couple would have to pump up before sex. “It was shocking,” Henner tells The Post, of that 2003 encounter.
“I thought, ‘There [has] to be another way,’ ” Brown adds. Happily, there was: After all, Brown had Henner, the actress and best-selling nutrition and health guru, in his corner.
So began their journey from sickness to health to “Changing Normal: How I Helped My Husband Beat Cancer” (Gallery Books, out now). Part medical memoir, part love story, the book comes 13 years after Brown’s cancer was diagnosed, 12 years since it went into remission and a decade after they finally wed.
Both 64, they first met in 1970 at the University of Chicago. But it wasn’t until 2003 — each of them by then divorced, with children — that they finally got together.
Barely two months after their first date, they were vacationing together when Henner noticed the toilet was streaked with blood. That’s when Brown told her: He’d been urinating blood for two years — something his
elderly urologist told him was “nothing.” Henner assured him it was indeed something.
“Thank God he called me when he did,” she says now, of her and Brown’s reunion. “I really thought I could help him. It wasn’t grandiose — I’m just connected to these incredible doctors.”
In fact, since her parents’ deaths — her father of a heart attack at 52, her mother from complications of rheumatoid arthritis at 58 — Henner had become “an obsessed student of health.” And she wasted no time playing Doctor Concierge to her new love, and steering him to a “new normal” — one that included eliminating certain foods (meat, sugar, dairy), exercising and managing stress.
Soon after they left that cancer surgeon’s office they saw a urologist who started Brown on immunotherapy — a treatment then considered experimental, but since acknowledged as an alternative to chemo and radiation.
For six weeks, Brown was given doses of BCG, a tuberculosis strain used to fight bladder cancer by stimulating the immune system. He says the treatment felt even worse than it sounds: “You have a catheter inserted in the penis, and [afterward] you’re basically pissing razor blades.”
Even so, the couple enjoyed unprotected sex just days later, to the horror of Brown’s doctor, who was thinking of the dangers the potentially toxic liquid tuberculosis could have on Henner. “If you two can’t stay away from each other, use condoms,” he told them. So they decided to make it an adventure, trying every kind of “fun” condom they could find.
Soon after the treatment started, spots were found on Brown’s lung. Henner was frantic. “Please let it just be lung cancer!’ ” she thought. “Lung cancer would be better than metastasized bladder cancer.” Lung cancer it was: stage 1. This time, they opted for surgery, which removed part of Brown’s lower lobe.
Henner remembers seeing her lover right after surgery, lying unconscious in a recovery room “right out of ‘Coma,’ ” full of blinking machines. When Brown finally came to, she told him what the surgeon told her: “I hope you like this guy, because he’s gonna be around for 30 years.”
Brown slid his hand out amid tubes and wires, and asked Henner to marry him. Which she did, happily, in 2006, two years after doctors gave him the “all clear.” They’ve since celebrated 12-plus years of remission.
To hear them tell it — speaking over separate extensions on a hotel phone, hoarse from talking so passionately about what they’d been through — theirs is a blissful marriage. Don’t they ever fight?
Henner laughs. “You didn’t see us when we were writing this book,” she says. “I kept saying, ‘Writing this book with you is harder than beating cancer!’”
“We were always making lemonade out of lemons. It was always, ‘We’re in this together.’ ” — Marilu Henner