"If I can create more awareness, I'll do it." - Cobie Smulders
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From playing ‘Robin Scherbatsky’ in the hit TV show ‘How I Met Your Mother’ to being a fierce S.H.I.E.L.D agent in the Marvel movies, the radiantactress Cobie Smulders has kept us hooked to the screen over the years. In real life, she is far more stronger than you think.
Recently, Smulders penned a Lenny Letter, through which she opened up about the age of 25’s scar – an ovarian cancer she battled. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 while filming the third season of HIMYM.
"Just when your ovaries should be brimming with youthful follicles, cancerous cells overtook mine, threatening to end my fertility and potentially my life," she wrote in the letter. "My fertility hadn't even crossed my mind at this point. Again: I was 25. Life was pretty simple. But suddenly it was all I could think about."
While she talked about her struggle in those days, Smulders also stated how posing topless for a May 2015 cover shoot for Women's Health magazine inspired her to think about what her body had gone through just a few years before.
In the candid essay, she revealed, "It was a very strange day. I was standing in front of a camera lens in my underwear and holding my breasts, all while trying to appear not sexy but confident, not flirtatious but gleamingly positive," she wrote. "It all made me start thinking about this body that I’m in. And what it has been through."
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obie Smulders on the cover of Women's Health in 2015 (Image Credit: Women's Health)
She shot that topless magazine cover less than two months after giving birth. Hats off to her!!
Smulders further went on saying that how the devastation and anxiety she had experienced in the midst of her cancer journey actually helped her change the prospective of life.
"I started meditating. I was constantly in a yoga studio. I went to energy healers who evaporated black smoke from my lower body… I went to a cleansing retreat in the desert where I didn’t eat for eight days and experienced hunger-driven hallucinations," she continued. "I read so many books (Crazy Sexy Cancer, by Kris Carr, was one of the best). I went to crystal healers. Kinesiologists. Acupuncturists. Naturopaths. Therapists. Hormone therapists. Chiropractors. Dietitians. Ayurvedic practitioners …"
"I really wish I could tell you what particular combination of these things, along with multiple surgeries, eventually gave me a clean bill of health," she added.
The 34-year-old actress is now fully healed and a proud mother of two daughters with her husband, Saturday Night Live star Taran Killam. "Thankfully, gratefully, cancer did not get the best of me," she wrote. "The best of me now lives on in my two little women, baby girls I was lucky enough to be able to make with my own body."
The Avengers star has now pulled up her socks to spread awareness about the disease, caring for those who suffer with the treatment every day. "I don’t know if I will ever be free of my cancer — or, to be more specific, free from the fear of my cancer’s return," she stated. "I wish that we as women spent as much time on the well-being of our insides as we do with our looks on the outside. If you are going through something like this, I urge you to look at all your options. To ask questions. To learn as much as you can about your diagnosis. To breathe. To ask for help. To cry and to fight."
Here is a video of Smulders' battle with ovarian cancer:
Smulders is not alone in this battle. The National Ovarian Cancer Coalition research says, more than 22,000 women in the US are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 14,000 die because of it.
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obie Smulders on the cover of Women's Health in 2015 (Image Credit: Women's Health)/shethepeople/media/post_attachments/CJiBvmE9FXSYT2XZ26lR.jpg)