'Baywatch' star Nicole Eggert burst into tears after being left with radiotherapy tattoos amid her cancer battle.
The 52-year-old actress was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer in December 2023, and after her latest CT scan for her course of radiation treatment, she has been left with a permanent "reminder" of her fight with the disease as the radiologist inked on a series of dots to map out the area they want to target.
In a video update on Instagram, she began: “OK so I just got out of my CT scan, mapping — as they call it — for my radiation treatment, and when they said they were gonna tattoo me, I didn’t realise it was actual, real tattoos, so I was tatted!"
Struggling to hold back the tears, she continued: "And it’s minor, it’s nothing but dots, but boy, every step of this process is never gonna let you forget it, there’s just always going to be a constant reminder.
“So yeah, I have tattoos. My mom’s gonna be really proud of my neck tattoo, but that’s OK, that’s OK.”
While she is not happy about her cancer tattoos, Nicole cannot fault the care of the staff where she is receiving her treatment.
She added: “And the people were wonderful and still not looking forward to it, whatsoever, but I got through that part and the rest is gonna have to just be me working on myself and how I’m gonna get through it and ignore these new tattoos that I have.”
Nicole recently expressed her concerns about the “damage” radiation can course after her own father was changed forever after having the treatment for brain tumours.
In a previously video update before her latest hospital visit, she said: “They’re gonna do CT scans and they call it imaging and tattooing of my organs, it’s so that when they shoot the radiation into me, they can hopefully miss most of the vital organs.
“They’ll hit some of them they’ve said to a degree, but hopefully not to a harmful degree.
“What I’m struggling with is I know the damage that radiation does, my father had it on his brain, he had tumors in his brain, and after the first treatment, he was not the same person anymore.”
Nicole recently admitted waiting to find out the next stages of her treatment has been the "hardest" part of her journey so far.
She told PEOPLE magazine: "I am good. I am in sort of a grey area and I finished my treatment, waiting for more imaging and hopefully maybe surgery.
“And there's a lot of waiting in this and it's sort of something I didn't really realise and nobody really talks about.
"But the grey area is the hardest because you don't know what's happening and you're just, when I'm doing treatment, I felt like I was doing something productive.
“So it felt positive and I was like, okay, I'm doing something positive. And now that it's just like nothing, it's like, well wait a minute. We got to get this out. So it's, it's just frustrating.”
