A lonely battle. Abby Lee Miller spoke candidly about her road to recovery exclusively in the new issue of Us Weekly, making the heartbreaking confession that she didn’t think it mattered if she lost her fight with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“You definitely feel alone. My three friends were there [at the hospital but] I’m an only child, my mom and dad are both deceased and I’m not married, I don’t have siblings to lean on,” the Dance Moms star, 52, says. “That’s why, for me, if I died, it didn’t really matter. There were people who care about me, but there wasn’t anybody dependent upon me.”
After completing a 12-month prison sentence for bankruptcy fraud charges in March 2018, the reality star was diagnosed with cancer. A year later, however, after chemotherapy and six spinal taps, Miller tells Us, “the cancer’s gone.”
“It was physically tough and emotionally draining,” she explains. “Dying is the easy way out of a situation like mine. Like in my situation, to lay in that hospital in intensive care and those ten minutes go by and my heart just stops, that was easy. Going through the surgery, recovering, going to therapy, learning how to pick up a toothbrush and brush your teeth again, learning how to sit up in the bed without falling over, trying to get my right foot to move again, to get my toes to wiggle, that was hard.”
She concluded: “It was hard, hard, hard work. And I’ve worked hard all my life, I don’t need to keep working.”
Miller announced her return to Dance Moms in December. Season 8 premieres on Lifetime June 4 at 9 p.m. ET.
For more from Miller, watch the video above and pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now!
