Steve Fleischmann is opening up about his late wife Erin Moran’s private battle with cancer days after the actress was found unresponsive at her home in Indiana on Saturday, April 22.
In a letter posted to Moran’s Happy Days costar Scott Baio’s Facebook page on Wednesday, April 26, Fleischmann revealed that Moran didn’t know she was deathly ill until around Thanksgiving 2016.
“Erin woke up and had about a dime size blood stain on her pillowcase,” her second husband shared. “She said ‘I think I bit my tongue’ … We get like 4 days into December, there’s more blood. I get a flashlight and say ‘let me look.’ It was not her tongue it was her tonsil and on the left side. I thought it was tonsillitis.”
Fleischmann explained that Moran was then diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma and that despite promptly beginning radiation and chemotherapy, the actress grew sicker.
“It got so bad so fast,” he recalled. “By the middle of February, Erin could no longer speak or eat or drink. She had a feeding tube implant and I feed her 6 to 8 times a day. She was still happy, she was active, she texted people on her phone all day.”
Her husband wrote that by April 21, she had difficulties breathing and that she died on April 22 in the comfort of her own home, watching TV and holding his hand.
“The coroner told me it was really bad,” Fleischmann wrote. “It had spread to her spleen, she had a lot of fluid in her lungs and part of her brain was infected. The coroner said even if she was in the hospital being pumped full of antibiotics she would still not [have] made it. He said it was the best that she was with me and went in her sleep.”
As previously reported, the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department and the Harrison County Coroner’s Office told Us in a joint statement that Moran “succumbed to complications of stage IV cancer.” She was 56.