Valerie harper's star shines while battling incurable lung cancer - aarp ever...

Harper, who has never smoked, was actually diagnosed with early lung cancer back in 2009. (Her mother, also a nonsmoker, died of the disease.) Harper's surgeon removed a lobe of her

lung, and, after repeated scans of her chest came back clear, she kept the diagnosis quiet and went on with her life. But at the beginning of this year, while rehearsing her Tony-nominated

Broadway play, _Looped_, in New York, Harper suddenly couldn't remember her lines and had trouble speaking. She was rushed to the hospital, where a brain scan revealed a scattering of

suspicious cells in her meninges, the thin, Saran Wrap-like layer of tissue that surrounds the brain. When doctors informed Cacciotti that they suspected Harper was suffering from

leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, with an average survival rate of three months, Cacciotti asked their daughter, Cristina, now 30, to give Harper the news. "Tony just couldn't do

it," Harper says. "Cristina doesn't have any hang-ups about death. When my stepmother, whom I love so much, died, Cristina cried, but then said, 'Well, she's gone

on. She's in heaven.' Cristina is an old soul." Tony, Valerie and daughter Cristina at age 6. Courtesy Harper-Cacciotti family A few days after her hospitalization, Harper

returned to Los Angeles, where her primary oncologist, Ronald B. Natale of the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, confirmed that the actress had an inoperable

metastasis of her 2009 lung cancer — not brain cancer, as the media first reported. Treating the disease would prove challenging because the blood-brain barrier, a collection of high-density

cells that protects the brain from infection, also blocks many traditional chemotherapy drugs, rendering them ineffective. Natale decided to try a drug called Tarceva, which targets a

genetic mutation of Harper's cancer. He prescribed an off-label regimen, giving Harper massive, all-at-once "pulse" doses in weekly intervals, in hopes that a high-enough

concentration would cross the blood-brain barrier. Harper is currently taking 10 Tarceva pills every seven days, and a recent MRI scan "was nearly normal," says Natale. "This

is one of the more dramatic successes I've seen with this treatment." That's not to say the actress is out of the woods. Harper's form of cancer "almost universally

becomes resistant to Tarceva after an average of 10 months," her doctor notes. So for now, Harper has been given the gift of time, and when the Tarceva stops working, says Natale,

"there are other things we can try. We're just going to push as hard as we can." Harper is certainly doing that, combining Western medical treatment with acupuncture and

herbal teas she gets from a doctor of Asian medicine. She has also been practicing imagery, envisioning a tiny Tinker Bell-like version of herself moving through her meninges, tapping her

cancer cells with a magical finger. "They then become glowing little good cells," she explains with a giggle, "or, if they're not willing to give up their cancer-ness,

they just turn into white lights. I talk to them, saying, 'Listen, you guys, this is dumb. We could live together. But you can't keep growing and crowding out the other cells.

You're killing the host!'" LIVING IN THE MOMENT On a breezy Sunday afternoon in late July, Harper and Cacciotti arrive at the racetrack in Del Mar, California, to attend a

fundraiser for the Lung Cancer Foundation of America. "I'm past my expiration date," Harper jokes as she addresses a small crowd before the horse races begin. "But

really, I am holding my own, as you can see. My motormouth has not stopped! Seriously," she continues, "what I have is not curable. That's not the way with this disease,

apparently. But who knows? This diagnosis makes you live one day at a time, and that's what everyone should do: Live moment to moment to moment." Harper has always displayed a joie

de vivre that audiences — and intimates — love. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" spinoff, "Rhoda," ran on CBS from 1974 to 1978. The character's signature 
head scarf

was Valerie Harper’s idea. CBS/Getty "Valerie has the best attitude in the world," says her former costar and good friend Betty White. "She's so open about everything —

it's not like she's trying to paint a false picture. She's kept her sense of humor and balance. My beloved husband Allen Ludden [who died from stomach cancer in 1981] had that

same attitude, and I swear it added a year we wouldn't have had." Still, Harper admits to having low moments. "There are times when I cry. I'll sit in the chair and feel

the depression, let it seethe. Then it starts to go away, and I find myself laughing, saying, 'Well, that was dramatic.' " A self-described agnostic, she attributes her

ability to cope largely to est (Erhard Seminars Training), which she received in the 1970s from human-potential-movement proponent Werner Erhard.