Teddi Mellencamp has opened up about her biggest fears after being diagnosed with stage four cancer.
The former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 44, was diagnosed with melanoma in 2022. Her condition advanced to stage four in February this year and metastasized to her lungs and brain. She then underwent major brain surgery that removed four tumors and received immunotherapy.
Mellencamp has since spoken openly about her cancer and her perspective on life because of it. During Tuesday’s episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast, she was asked what she was the “most fearful” about right now.
“I’m most fearful of either the most obvious,” she responded, referring to death. “Or I’m fearful of feeling alone.”
“This is an irrational fear,” she explained. “I have so many friends and family who are there for me. Where some people aren’t blessed with that.”
She confessed that she needs to get this fear “out of [her] head.”
Sshe also believes that she’s “most certain” that she is “strong enough” to live with or beat her cancer.
“I am well equipped. I have good family. I have a lot of love,” the reality star said. “And as long as I keep staying strong, and as long as I keep believing, and staying as positive as I can, I’m going to be OK.”
Mellencamp has continued to give updates about her condition. Last month, she revealed her decision to stop the immunotherapy treatment she was receiving after her surgery, due to the side effects she was experiencing.
“Essentially, what we figured out with me was, yes, I started out feeling great, and I could do all the pods and I could do all these things,” she said during an episode of her show, Two Ts in a Pod.
“I could go to all my daughter’s horse shows and I could stay at my house by myself, and I felt really strong,” she added.
However, Mellencamp admits that the side effects from the treatment have left her barely being able to keep her eyes open and struggling to “keep her words straight.”
“I’m on steroids and we’re doing everything that we can to get me back to feeling like I, you know, I can do this, I can do all the things,” she said.
Days earlier, she did an interview with Glamour, where she said her doctors did not perform scans of her stage one melanoma when it was first discovered on her shoulder.
“I never really thought about it because I was like, ‘I go to a doctor every three months. Why wouldn’t they get me checked?’ My highest melanoma on my shoulder was stage one. When I finally followed up on it, they were like, ‘We didn’t do the scans, because you didn't have anything above a stage one on your body.’ But look what happened,” Mellencamp said.
Mellencamp and her estranged husband, Edwin Arroyave, share three young children: Slate, 12; Cruz, 10; and Dove, five.
