Hallmark star Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe has shared details about her ongoing health struggle.
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The 44-year-old actress revealed she has stage three cancer in a personal essay for PEOPLE published on Friday.
“Like many women, I have always had a love-hate relationship with my body. Long before it gave me my two beautiful children, I was a bikini model in magazines like Maxim, and, early in my acting career, I spent many years playing roles that were hyper-focused on how I looked,” Lowe wrote. “And I felt that pressure, constantly checking my body, adjusting, second-guessing whether I was ‘enough.’ It was a quiet battle, fought daily.”
Lowe, who shares a nine-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son with her husband, Miko Tomasevich, said things changed after she joined Hallmark’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” movie series as Rita Haywith.
“For the first time, I was being seen for my craft. But, if I’m being honest, the mirror still calls me sometimes. I still check in. I still look. Only this last time, it wasn’t about my insecurity. It was about something much more important: my health,” Lowe added.
Back in February, the director found “a large mass in my right breast.”
“In that moment, everything else fell away. At first, I thought I had sprained a muscle while working out. To be safe, I immediately went to my doctor, who ordered a mammogram and guided ultrasound, but found nothing,” the L-Word alum recalled. “‘The breast is just one of those things,’ they said casually. ‘It’s a mystery…’”
Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe Recalls Her Doctor Telling Her, “This Feels Like Cancer”
Months later, the mass was still present but had changed in “size and placement.”
Her doctor rushed a biopsy after she returned, stating: “‘Honey, I can’t be sure, but this feels like cancer.’”
“I just stared at him, blinking as if I hadn’t heard him correctly. ‘I don’t have cancer,’ I thought. That’s crazy. But deep down, something inside me whispered, ‘What if?’” Lowe recalled.
“Three days later, my G.P. called to say I had invasive carcinoma in one of the ducts. I still remember getting off the phone, curling up into a ball, and just bawling,” she admitted. Lowe also praised her husband for giving her the space to process the news.
“Essentially, I’m looking at the whole deal: chemo, double mastectomy, radiation, and, eventually, implants… As someone who’s never had any major illness, it was a lot to digest,” the mom of two wrote. “Annie [Howell] and the entire Hallmark family embraced me fully, and told me that they had my back.”
Before starting chemotherapy, Lowe decided to reframe her story.
“I decided to look at my chemo as a warrior. I named her the most Scottish name I could think of, Agnes McDonald. Agnes would be my fierce warrior who would battle ‘Barry,’ the nickname I’d given to my cancer,” she wrote.
“I asked my husband to pull up an image of a Scottish warrior with fiery red hair and a massive sword. He complied. Once I had that image in my mind, I put on the Braveheart soundtrack (yes, I’m dramatic), and for the first time since my diagnosis, I felt strong. I (and Agnes) was ready for battle.”
“If I have one message for all of you, I guess it would be this: This journey has been scary, strange, and humbling. It has stripped me down in ways I never saw coming, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. And yet… I promise to persevere,” she concluded. “To turn poison into medicine. To grow. That’s what I’m learning every single day.”