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Marlyne Barrett, who stars on NBC’s Chicago Med as Nurse Maggie Lockwood, is opening up about her real-life cancer battle.
The 44-year-old actress, who shares 11-month-old twins Joshuah-Jireh and Ahnne-N’Urya with husband Gavin Barrett, revealed to People in an interview published online Tuesday that she was diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer in July and has been taking it “one day at a time” as she prepares to undergo her third round of chemotherapy at City of Hope medical center in Los Angeles.
Barrett said she underwent hernia repair in April and didn’t feel well after that, and that she was stunned when doctors informed her on July 18 that she had a tumor the size of a football on her uterus and left ovary.
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“I had this accumulation of fluid [in my abdomen] that I couldn’t shake,” she said of her health before the diagnosis. “I looked like I was nine months pregnant. And I also had shortness of breath, but no pain, which was interesting.”
Barrett called the diagnosis a “shock to my womanhood” and said her family had no history of ovarian or uterine cancers. She recalled learning from the doctors that she has cancer: “I didn’t believe them, but when they showed me the CT scan, I went, ‘Oh, my word.’ The first questions were, ‘Am I going to live?’ I just fell into my husband’s arms. It still takes my breath away when I think about it.”
The actress, who is also known for recurring on FX’s Damages and HBO’s The Wire, praised her family for their support, including her pastor husband, whom she wed in 2009. She included her children in the process of shaving her head to prepare for the chemo treatment, and she posted a photo on Instagram on Tuesday of herself with her short hairdo.
“My hair has always been an essence of beauty,” Barrett said. “But I took my own razor, and I shaved my head. I did it in front of my babies so they’d see it was still Mommy. I wept, I wept, I wept. But it was a beautiful experience to do it in front of them.”
She explained that she is continuing to film Chicago Med but that she starts her day an hour early, along with taking naps and occasionally staying home from set for a day. Barrett calls herself a very private person but felt that she owed it to her fans to share this journey with them, given the appreciative social media messages she said she received during a 2019 storyline for Chicago Med that involved Maggie’s battle with breast cancer.
“I have a wave of emotion that comes,” the actress continued. “But it’s OK not to have it all together. You can’t tangibly hold onto fear. But I’m holding onto faith.”
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