‘SNL’s Victoria Jackson Struggles With Inoperable Cancer

Saturday Night Live alumna Victoria Jackson has an inoperable tumor in her windpipe, according to a series of candid Instagram posts that she shared recently. 

“They cannot operate and cut out the marble in my chest that is laying on my windpipe, and eventually would suffocate me to death,” Jackson said on her social media post in what she called Episode #11 of “Is The Cancer Back? — Starring Me, Unfortunately.”

Jackson, whose breathing sounds compromised in the video, revealed that her doctors are giving her “a magic pill. It’s going to be delivered to my front door within the next 12 hours. It’s based on Ribociclib, and it will shrink the marble, hopefully.”

She Googled the pill to determine a prognosis. “It says people who take this have 32.6 months to live — something like that,” versus 28 months for people who took a placebo, she explained. Deadline cited a New England Journal of Medicine article with a more optimistic view, determining that Robociclib “has a significant overall survival benefit” in certain patients with advanced breast cancer.

Despite the harrowing diagnosis, Jackson is upbeat in her video updates. “I’ve had a fantastic life,” she said, sharing that she may have heard God asking if she was ready to come home. Before she goes, Jackson said, “I’d like to see my grandson born — his name is Jimmy — in October and get to know him a little, and I would like to see my daughter Aubrey have a baby.”

“So I’m dying in three months if I don’t have a heart attack or get hit by a car or a meteor or a terrorist or an illegal — not to make light of all that. This world is suffering,” she said. “That’s why comedy is good to forget about it.” 

Jackson shared a request from a fan to sing a song about dying that she performed in a movie called Marriage Retreat, vowing to relearn the tune she wrote to fill the request. 

“When you see in print you have 23.6 months, it makes you think, you know?” she explained. “But I wouldn’t change anything.”