Medical maladies are one of the most popular forms of torture inflicted upon the fictional denizens of the soap world. Amnesia, cancer, infertility, horrific scarring – beloved characters suffer them all and so much more. But you don’t expect a soap star to go through it in real life!
Who Is The Soap Star In Question?
All of these actresses are either one-time stars of long-gone daytime TV programs – like All My Children – or alums of one of the four remaining daytime dramas – The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of our Lives, General Hospital, and The Young and the Restless. But only one of them can claim that at 18 years of age, she underwent a special medical procedure in order to have a benign brain tumor removed.
But who can that actress be? Is it Hillary B. Smith (ex-Dr. Stacy Barton, BB), Linsey Godfrey (Dr. Sarah Horton, DAYS), Susan Lucci (ex-Erica Kane, AMC), or Michelle Stafford (Phyllis Summers, YR)?
Hillary B. Smith
Smith never needed treatment for a brain tumor, but the same can’t be said for her One Life to Live alter-ego Nora Hanen Gannon Buchanan, who suffered blindness because of the mass inside her head.
Linsey Godfrey
Though she was never diagnosed with a brain tumor, Godfrey’s medical history could put even the most put-upon soap opera heroine to shame. First, the budding thespian was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma – which derailed her career by two full years. Then in 2015, she was struck by a vehicle, which resulted in both of her ankles being broken!
Susan Lucci
Lucci never suffered the ill effects of a brain tumor, but she was involved in a serious car accident that left her with injuries that required the expertise of a plastic surgeon.
Of the incident, Lucci once recalled that “When we got to the emergency room, the nurses were talking about me in the past tense, saying, ‘Oh, I could tell she was a beautiful girl.’ One of them saw my engagement ring and said, ‘Gee, honey, do you think he’ll still marry you?’”
Michelle Stafford
Eighteen-year-old Stafford worried about her suddenly swollen eyelid and her inability to get it to return to its natural state. Blood tests and an X-ray determined that the young woman suffered from a type of white blood cell deficiency, which had caused a large tumor to form near the front of her brain.
Surgery was a necessity. And Stafford chose a doctor, “who said he wouldn’t shave my head…That was the thing I was most freaked out about at 18 — ‘Oh my God, they can’t take my hair.'”
Instead, the surgeon peeled down the actress’s face! “There was a plastic surgeon there to put my face back together. Then they had to have an ophthalmologist to make sure I didn’t go blind because they didn’t know what they were cutting through. There were all these possibilities. It was a nine-hour surgery.”
So, if you guessed that Michelle Stafford – who has played YR’s resident bad girl (on-and-off) since October 1994 – was the soap star in question, then you were absolutely correct!
