Big Ang was beside herself after learning of her cancer diagnosis. The late Mob Wives star opened up about her deteriorating health to Dr. Oz, in one of her final interviews before she died at the age of 55 on Thursday, Feb. 18.
“I couldn’t hear what [the doctors] were saying. I couldn’t even understand,” Big Ang recalled during the sit-down, which aired this past Tuesday. “I felt like I was deaf. ‘You have stage IV brain cancer, and we don’t know how this happened.’ I’m like, ‘I can’t hear. I just can’t even hear this.'”
The doctors then gave her the next steps, which made the situation very real. “They’re like, ‘We’re sorry, we don’t know, but now you have to go through another doctor. You have to find a brain doctor, a lung, an oncology, a chemo,'” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is going too fast for me.’ Now, I’m just hysterical.”
The TV personality also spoke about a 10-hour surgery she had last April. “They couldn’t even intubate me, because the tumor was so big. It took two hours for them to get the pipe down,” she revealed. “It was the worst. Then 10 hours. They removed all the lymph nodes and the tumor that one time.”
Two months later, Big Ang underwent a second procedure and was told that she was cancer-free. It returned in December 2015.
Big Ang received plenty of support from her loved ones in her final days. (She left her husband, Neil Murphy, however, because he didn’t “step up to the plate.”) Her fans and Mob Wives costars paid tribute to her following her death.
“Angela was a great person and fun to be around,” Marissa Jade told Us Weekly in a statement. Carla Facciolo added via Instagram: “My beautiful friend is with the Angels now. Angela u will be missed more than anyone I [know]!”
Watch Big Ang’s last interview in the video above.
