Nicole Eggert’s daughters have been her biggest support system throughout her breast cancer journey.
“My girls are just, they’re my rocks,” Eggert, 52, shared of her daughters Dilyn, 25, and Keegan, 12, in an exclusive interview with Us Weekly. “They have been so amazing through all of this because it’s strange.”
Despite their support, Eggert admitted that she was initially worried about how her cancer diagnosis would affect her youngest child — particularly how Keegan would react to her bald head amid treatment. “For Keegan, I was worried about, maybe, she’d be embarrassed that her mom is bald. Her mom really sticks out, but she’s not at all,” she shared. “She’s proud. They’re proud of me. They’re right by my side. They’re giving me the most grace and checking on me constantly and asking me how I’m doing and we’re really just loving on each other really hard.”
The Baywatch alum revealed her breast cancer diagnosis in January, sharing that she was diagnosed with stage 2 cribriform carcinoma after having “terrible pain” in her left breast in October 2023.
Eggert shaved her head on camera with the help of Keegan earlier this month and shared the inspiring footage with fans via Instagram. “Maybe healing involves not so much changing ourselves but allowing ourselves to be who we are – Madeleine Eames,” she captioned the post.
Shaving her head is something Eggert told Us she’s always been interested in. And despite being hesitant to do it at first, she eventually accepted that it’s a part of the cancer process. “By the time I shaved my head, I was happy to lose the hair because it was driving me insane with the hair loss,” she shared. “It was gross and it was in my face, and it was bothersome, and it just was such a task to deal with. So, it was a relief to get rid of it.”
Amid her breast cancer treatment, Eggert told Us one thing she’s learned is to “ask for help and to be open” because you don’t need to “do everything on your own.”
She went on to note that she doesn’t feel “embarrassed” when people work out her cancer diagnosis on their own when seeing her bald head. “[People are] expecting it, and I think it just brings a level of comfort for everybody involved,” Eggert explained. “There’s not an awkward moment. They don’t feel like they can’t talk about it or ask questions or say anything. So for me, it just brings a comfortability about it.”
Publicly sharing her cancer journey with fans is something Eggert told Us is very important to her. “Well, on one side of the coin, you want to normalize it because so many of us are touched by it, whether it’s directly or indirectly,” she stated. “On the other hand, we don’t want this to be normal. We want to [find a] cure for this. And it is time that something happens, but you either keep it very quiet and secret and you hide it, which to me seems like a very big task and very isolating and depressing.”
For now, the “Perfectly Twisted” podcast host is encouraging both women and men to perform “self-exams” in addition to seeing a doctor in order to catch early signs of cancer, something she didn’t do “regularly” prior to her diagnosis.
“I did a self-exam and I could feel a mass, I could feel a lump clearly, and it was devastating because it was right there and I could have felt it sooner and I didn’t, but my body let me know it was there,” she shared. “It definitely had to listen to the signs.” (A GoFundMe page has recently been set up for the actress by her friend Mindy Molinary.)
With reporting by Leanne Aciz Stanton
