Full House star has cancer

Dave Coulier has been diagnosed with cancer.

The 65-year-old actor - who is best known for starring as Joey Gladstone on the classic ABC sitcom 'Full House' - received the news that he is suffering from stage three Non-Hodgkin lymphoma after initially visiting the doctors for what he assumed was a simple cold.

He told People: "Three days later, my doctors called me back and they said, ‘We wish we had better news for you, but you have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and it's called B cell and it's very aggressive.

"I went from, I got a little bit of a head cold to I have cancer, and it was pretty overwhelming.

“This has been a really fast roller coaster ride of a journey."

Dave was diagnosed with the form of blood cancer in in October after an upper respiratory infection led to swelling in his lymph nodes, and medics immediately conducted PET and CT scans and a biopsy.

The 'Surreal Life' star - who was previously married to Jayne Modean and has 24-year-old son Luc with her but has now been married to Melissa Bring for a decade - underwent a test to check for cancer cells within his bone marrow and when that came back negative, he felt a flash of optimism as his chances of survival increased.

He said: "We all kind of put our heads together and said, ‘Okay, where are we going?’ And they had a very specific plan for how they were going to treat this?

"At that point, [when the test came back negative] my chances of curable went from something low to 90% range. And so that was a great day.”

Dave started chemotherapy two weeks after his diagnosis and shaved his head as a "preemptive strike"so he could tackle the whole ordeal "head-on".

Speaking on the 'Full House Rewind' podcast, he told co-host Marla Sokoloff: "I started the podcast wearing a hat, and I said, I've always been a man of many hats, but this hat has special significance because a couple of weeks ago, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

"That was really a conscious decision of, I'm going to meet this head-on, and I want people to know it's my life. I'm not going to try and hide anything. I would rather talk about it and open the discussion and inspire people."