Health Conditions / Cancer / Leukemia & Lymphoma

Jane Fonda just received, in her words, the “best birthday present ever.” She is officially in remission. The 84-year-old actor, who will be 85 on December 21, first announced her non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in September. She shared the positive news about her prognosis yesterday. “I can discontinue chemo,” she wrote in a blog post that she promoted on Instagram. “I am feeling so blessed, so fortunate.”The Grace and Frankie star said the treatment had started to take a toll on her: “I’m especially happy because while my first four chemo treatments were rather easy for me, only a few days of being tired, the last chemo session was rough and lasted two weeks making it hard to accomplish much of anything.”Lymphoma is a cancer of the lymph system, which is part of the immune system, per the US National Library of Medicine. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma occurs when white blood cells become abnormal. In a September blog post, Fonda joked, “So many people have written to me or posted that they have had this type of cancer and have been cancer-free for many decades. Well, I’ll soon be 85 so I won’t have to worry about ‘many decades.’ One will do just fine.”This, unfortunately, wasn’t Fonda’s first experience with cancer. She publicly shared her breast cancer diagnosis in 2010, People reported, and she subsequently had a mastectomy. In 2018, Fonda also shared that she had a cancerous spot removed from her lip, according to Allure. “This is not my first encounter with cancer…I’ve come through well and I will do so again,” she wrote in the September blog post.Fonda has talked at length about how grateful she is for her medical care in recent months. In the Instagram post announcing her diagnosis, she said: “I’m also lucky because I have health insurance and access to the best doctors and treatments. I realize, and it’s painful, that I am privileged in this…. Far too many don’t have access to the quality health care I am receiving and this is not right.” She’s also been vocal about her thoughts on aging; she’s thankful for the privilege of growing older, despite the health issues she’s faced over the years. In an interview with CBS News earlier this year, Fonda, who has undergone multiple joint replacement surgeries, said: “My knees are not mine, my hips are not mine, my shoulder’s not mine…I mean, I’m almost 85. The fact that I’m still alive and working—who cares if I don’t have my old joints and I can’t ski or bike or run anymore?” She noted that, as cliché as it sounds, age really is just a number: “You know, you can be really old at 60, and you can be really young at 85.”In her remission announcement, Fonda also thanked those who “sent good thoughts” her way, writing, “I am confident that it played a role in the good news.”Related:

The Procter & Gamble Company has issued a nationwide voluntary recall for several varieties of Old Spice and Secret aerosol sprays with expiration dates running through September 2023 after the known carcinogen benzene was discovered in some of their products.“The affected products are used as antiperspirants and hygiene products and are packaged in aerosol cans,” the company said in a statement that details which products have been recalled. If you or a loved one uses any of the affected products, throw them away and visit www.oldspice.com or www.secret.com for information on how to get a refund. Benzene is created both naturally and by human activity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s formed in fires and volcanoes and occurs within gasoline, cigarette smoke, and crude oil. But it’s also widely used in industrial processes—it’s one of the top 20 chemicals used by production volume—when manufacturing plastics, resin, synthetic fibers, lubricants, rubbers, dyes, detergents, drugs, and pesticides. This means that you probably have some benzene exposure in your regular day-to-day lives regardless of whether a product you use is on this recall list.Benzene is a known carcinogen, but that doesn’t mean that using one of these products automatically means you’ll get cancer (or even have a markedly higher risk of developing the disease). “Based on exposure modeling and the cancer risk assessments published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (IRIS database), daily exposure to benzene in the recalled products at the levels detected in our testing would not be expected to cause adverse health consequences,” according to The Procter & Gamble Company’s statement. “To date, The Procter & Gamble Company has not received any reports of adverse events related to this recall and is conducting this recall out of an abundance of caution.”The concerns about benzene are mainly about exposure to large amounts of it. In the short term, people who inhale large quantities of benzene can experience drowsiness and dizziness, changes to their heartbeat, headaches, tremors, confusion, and even death when it’s inhaled in extremely high amounts, the CDC explains. If a large amount of benzene is ingested (through eating or drinking contaminated food or beverages), it can lead to vomiting, convulsions, irregular heartbeat, or death (again, at very high levels).Over time, benzene can make it difficult for bone marrow to produce red blood cells, and it can damage the immune system, increase bleeding, and increase infection rates. Long-term exposure to high amounts of benzene in the air is known to cause leukemia.The chemical was found in the Procter & Gamble Company products by an independent pharmaceutical testing company, Valisure, which made a Citizen’s Petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to have the products recalled. During their testing, they found benzene in rates as high as 17.7 parts per million (ppm)—much higher than the FDA’s limit of 2 ppm.Valisure found other products that contained benzene in rates higher than 2 ppm too, including sprays from Tag, Suave, Equate, Sure, Right Guard, and Brut, though rates were highest among specific Secret and Old Spice batches. So far, recalls have not been issued for the other brands.It’s not the first time benzene has shown up in topical products. As SELF previously reported, Neutrogena and Aveeno recalled several batches of sunscreen in July.Related: