Young & Restless’ Michelle Stafford Opens Up About the Brain Tumor That Nearly Derailed Her Life
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From modelling to Emmy winning daytime star, The Young and the Restless‘ Michelle Stafford’s life has been anything but dull. But even she surprised Days of Our Lives‘ Greg Rikaart (Leo) and The Bold and the Beautiful‘s Rebecca Budig (Taylor) when she stopped by for a chat on their Soapy podcast.
Things started out easy enough, but then Phyllis’ portrayer jumped right into one of the most difficult times of her life! “I had a brain tumor,” she says of when she’d just turned 19. “But I had it taken out.”
This was just when Stafford was trying to get her modeling career off the ground and, well, her worries were a bit different back then! ”When I found out it was a brain tumor,” she admitted, “the thing that upset me the most was getting my hair shaved off. I’m 19, and I wanted to model and this was going to not work out for me well, I felt.”
“I had my priorities,” she chuckled. “I mean, I had a brain tumor!” Looking back, Stafford notes how profound the experience was and can’t hold back tears. But at the time?
“I [felt], ‘It’ll be fine,’” she laughed. “My parents, everybody around me was tripping out. I’m like, ‘Oh we’ll just take it out. We’ll just cut it out. They’ll just open my brain.’ Like, they had to take my face off.”
Stafford can chuckle now at her hosts’ stunned reactions, but at the time, clearly it was a huge medical emergency.
“You didn’t think it was going to go here, did you,” she laughed as Budig and Rikaart sat jaws on the floor. “And so it was a big deal. I think now it’s a pretty different surgery, but yeah, I just thought, ‘We’ll just do that. It’s a bump in the road and we’ll move on.’ So I’m glad it actually worked out the way it did.”
“I remember when I was being wheeled down,” Stafford confessed, “and I remember the feeling of going, ‘Nothing will ever be this hard.’ I just thought, ‘Nothing will ever be this bad. Nothing in my life from here on out will ever be this bad.’ But that’s not true. There would be worse things.”
Maybe, but that doesn’t diminish what she went through. As Budig pointed out, that whole experience still “is terrifying.” Worse, when they went in, initially they thought the tumor was cancerous. It was a few days before they got news that it was benign.
And it definitely left a mark, because after going through the surgery, “I had this kind of weird [thought process], ‘I gotta jump out of planes. I gotta just fly to Italy and see what happens.” She became a model and grabbed life by the horns, embarking on a path that eventually led her to daytime and Phyllis.
“I wasn’t afraid,” she recalled of the immediate aftermath. “Now I have children and I’m afraid. It’s ridiculous.”
But that got Rikaart thinking. “Maybe the lesson to be learned in all this is finding that part of you again and instilling that in your kids. Wouldn’t it be great if it didn’t take the brain tumor to get you to sort of have that freedom?”
That’s definitely food for thought, but ultimately, we’re just glad everything worked out and Stafford has been healthy and happy to grace our screens for over three decades!