Mindy Cohn- My Battle With Breast Cancer

THE BELOVED FACTS OF LIFE STAR OPENS UP ABOUT HER HEALTH BATTLE—AND HOW LOVED ONES GAVE HER STRENGTH

- Steve Helling

One morning in 2012 Mindy Cohn’slife changed forever. “I was walking around my neighborhood in Los Angeles and I suddenly got sotired,” says the actress best known for playing Natalie Green in the ’80s sitcom The Facts of Life. “I just couldn’t go anymore. I texted my friend Helen Hunt and said, ‘Something’s wrong with me. I need help.’ And she took me straight to the doctor.” A scan showed a lump in Cohn’s breast, and before she knew it, she was getting biopsied. “It was breast cancer,” she says, her voice tightening. “I kept it secret for years.”

Currently in remission, Cohn, 51, says she’s finally ready to open up about her experience now that she feels that the worst is behind her. Sitting in a farmhouse outside Sharon Springs, N.Y., Cohn is candid and calm while discussing her five-year ordeal, which included a double mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation. “I’ve always been an optimist,” she says. “But the cancer metastasized. It kept spreading and coming back. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then it would. And then I’d wait for another shoe to drop, and it would. I was frustrated and enraged. I couldn’t control any of this. I couldn’t fix it.”