Erik Jensen, the 53-year-old actor who played Steven Edwards in season five of the AMC drama “The Walking Dead,” announced this week that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer that has spread to his liver.
“After miraculously surviving a brain aneurysm just a year and a half ago, our beloved Erik Jensen was just diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer,” the actor’s family wrote on a GoFundMe post. “The cancer has metastasized to his liver, but Erik is young and strong (cutting a film during chemo, working full-time as a director and writer throughout) and his doctors think they have a shot at shrinking the tumors enough to do two very major surgeries and get them all out. He can make it through this. But Erik and his family are in for the fight of their lives, and they need your support.”
To learn more about what a stage 4 colorectal cancer diagnosis means and how it’s treated, we sat down with Christopher Lieu, MD, associate director of clinical research at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.