Laura Orrico was just 30 years old – less than two months shy of her birthday – when her husband of three years and partner for eight years, Ryan Cosgrove, was diagnosed with a brain tumor that would eventually claim his life.
From the day he was diagnosed in July 2007, Laura said she was always ‘on edge’ and watching for symptoms of his grade-two astrocytoma tumor that was discovered after he had a seizure one night ‘out of the blue.’
‘He’d never had seizure before. We went to bed and I heard some rumbling noises, and I flipped the light on, and he was having a full-blown, grand mal seizure,’ she told DailyMail.com from her home in Chicago.
‘That lasted about eight minutes, and it was terrifying because at first, I didn’t know what was going on, I called 911 immediately.
‘It was awful… obviously we got him to the ER and within less than 24 hours [he] was diagnosed with a brain tumor. You never know, life changes in an instant.’
Laura Orrico was just 30 years old when her husband of three years and partner for eight years, Ryan Cosgrove, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2007. Pictured here in 2008
From the day he was diagnosed in July 2007, Laura said she was always ‘on edge’ and watching for symptoms of his grade-two astrocytoma tumor. Pictured on their wedding day in 2004
Laura said renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Keith Black at Los Angeles’s Cedar-Sinai Hospital removed as much of Ryan’s tumor – which was at risk of progressing into ‘higher grades’ – as he could.
The actress, who has appeared in TV series such as Kevin Can Wait and CSI: Miami during her career that has spanned more than two decades, described finding out about her late husband’s diagnosis as ‘scary’ and it took visits to three hospitals before they finally got a definitive answer about what was happening.
‘It was probably one of the most terrifying things not knowing what the future was, because our lives were amazing. We’re at the peak of everything, my acting career in TV and film, and him as a graphic designer in television and film.
‘And all of a sudden your lives just change, and you just get that sick pit of your stomach of not really knowing what this means, not understanding it, very scary.’
Laura, now 47, fondly recalls how the pair met back in 1999 while seeing Mike Myers’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me with a group of friends at the movie theater.
‘Nobody was setting us up on purpose, and we just clicked. We just hit it off. We all went to see Austin Powers Part Two,’ she said with a laugh.
‘Oh, we had a blast, and he asked for my number at the end of the night, and we, as he always described, were never apart since.
‘He went home that night and woke up his parents in bed and said, “I met the girl I’m gonna marry.”‘
The heartbreaking news came less than 24 hours after Ryan had a seizure one night ‘out of the blue’ in July 2007
Laura said renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Keith Black at Los Angeles ‘s Cedar-Sinai Hospital removed as much of Ryan’s tumor as he could. Ryan pictured third right in 2014
But for almost eight years, Ryan would continue his battle with the brain tumor. The couple are pictured here in 2014 with Bill and Janis Corsair
And five years later in 2004, the couple did tie the knot.
But their happiness was rocked when Ryan was diagnosed and he spent nearly eight years battling the disease that would end up killing him.
‘It was a lot of up and down with the brain tumor, he battled it for just shy of eight years, [and] during that time he had nine recurrences,’ Laura, who would go on to become his full-time caregiver in the last nine months of his life, told DailyMail.com.
‘So what that looks like and the big picture was the first two months going through surgery, starting treatments, and he wanted to go back to work. So within a month and a half he went back to work.
‘And he couldn’t drive because he had had that seizure, so I would drive him to and from Manhattan Beach studios. He was working on a TV show called CSI: Miami, and I would drive him from the Valley… a couple of friends helped, we paid a couple of people that he worked with to help us.
‘Throughout the first six years, if you looked at him and you didn’t know him well, you wouldn’t really know he was going through anything. His hair grew back in, he was able to drive again. He didn’t gain or lose weight. He was just Ryan, but we know what was going on behind the scenes, and some close friends and family would come in and out of town from Chicago to visit.’
During the eight years he was sick, Ryan had two ‘clinical remissions,’ where the tumor was not ‘necessarily gone’ but was still visible on an MRI.
Laura said during those times, the tumor wasn’t active and it wasn’t enhancing, which meant it was stable.
The whole time Ryan was ill, Laura said she was ‘on edge,’ but the couple kept living their lives ‘as much as we could.’
‘We just went about our lives and it becomes your new normal. So we found ways to obviously to have the doctors’ appointments, the treatments, the scans, the blood work, all that worked into our normal lives,’ she explained.
‘It grows with you and you become okay with it. But we also learned that it’s important to stay positive. I was more of the nervous person than [Ryan] was. He was calm and never complained, unless he had a bad migraine, in which cause he would just rest.
‘But for me, it was really difficult because I just always, like I said, had that pit in my stomach, you would never know what you’re gonna wake up to in the morning, and what the next appointment, or what the next scan is gonna show.’
In March 2015 (pictured during his last birthday party to celebrate his 39th), Ryan started losing his ability to stand
Laura has appeared in TV series such as Kevin Can Wait and CSI: Miami. She’s pictured above with the former show’s Kevin James and Leah Remini
As for how she and Ryan balanced these tough moments in their lives over the years with happier memories, they found pockets of time to enjoy themselves.
‘We’d walk in the area in Cedar-Sinai and go for a nice lunch somewhere, go see a movie after, always having things to look forward to really helped us,’ Laura said.
‘Sometimes people going through treatments, you can’t always afford those things. So you find things you can do, even if it’s watching something funny on TV before you go to bed. Laughter, positivity, you know all that is so crucial to healing, and for me as a caregiver, just to have things that make you happy.’
A year and a half before Ryan died, the couple moved back to Chicago, where Laura would continue to self-tape auditions for acting roles, while her husband got a job doing graphic design work on an ABC TV show in the city.
But things took a bad turn when Laura got a troubling phone call from Ryan’s boss.
‘He said, “You know, Ryan seems like he’s having difficulty walking straight.” He’d be walking towards something and start to turn, and he just wasn’t seeming himself,’ she recalled.
‘I see him on a daily basis, but we’re walking around our three-story townhouse, and I wasn’t noticing all that. Then there were other things. There was all of a sudden a quick cognitive decline… so one of the most difficult things I had to do during this was go pick him up and tell him that I think he needed to take some time off work and come home and get well.
‘In the back of my mind, I didn’t think he was going to, which was terrible because you want to think positive.’
Laura took him to see his doctors and she had them reevaluate his vision and do another MRI.
‘I was making them do MRIs all the time, because every time something would happen I would freak out. You start to learn, you become like a doctor, you know your loved one when you’re the sole caregiver,’ she explained.
‘So basically, they let him work from home. He really wanted to work, even though he was having a lot of difficulty, even with vision. He worked another month or so from home, but… [he] was losing a lot of cognitive stuff, especially with the vision, a little confusion, little bit of memory loss.’
Laura decided to hit pause on her career and took time off in the last nine months of his life to spend it with him.
A short time later in March 2015, while the couple was out to dinner with friends, Ryan could ‘barely stand,’ Laura recalled.
‘All of a sudden he was starting to lose the ability to walk, and my heart sank,’ she said, adding they had a walker in the car in case he was unstable and while she was retrieving it she remembered she was ‘sick to my stomach.’
Her career has spanned more than two decades. She’s pictured here with Leonardo DiCaprio
At the same time as Ryan’s health was declining, Laura’s aunt was also rushed to the ER and she ‘didn’t make it past 24 hours.’
‘She was almost 96, I think, so it was a blessing to have her that long, but for all of this to happen at once, I was heartsick, because these are my two closest people, aside from my mom and my grandma,’ she added.
After losing his ability to walk, doctors told Laura that there wasn’t really anything more they could do for Ryan.
‘We could try to do proton beam radiation and focalize and really try to zap what’s left. But it had started to spread. Tumors will metastasize in the brain, depending on the kind,’ she said, but they did try other treatments.
With the stress piling on, Laura said she started getting sick from exhaustion. She dropped down to 112 pounds as she witnessed her husband slowly slip away.
‘I’m realizing now, a month before he passed, that that’s all hitting me. I got so sick that they had to take me to the ER. I was fine. I came home that night, but I went and stayed at my mom’s house, and Ryan was gonna stay one night with his parents,’ she said.
Laura then got a call from his dad who told her that Ryan had fallen off the radiation table and while she was sick, she picked him up and brought her husband to the home they shared.
‘I wanted to be the one to take care of him. I didn’t want to send him anywhere, put him anywhere, and then I got a call from the doctor, saying, I have to recommend to you that he goes on hospice… again my heart sinks,’ she said.
Laura said she couldn’t bring herself to break the heartbreaking news to Ryan himself, so she arranged a meeting for them with his doctor.
‘I just remember [Ryan’s] reaction. He was really a little bit out of it at the time, and everything was very slow. It was almost in slow motion, his reactions, his speech and they described it in a way where they said, you know this doesn’t mean anything, but… think of it like a break from treatment’ she said.
‘So basically what had happened, we exhausted every treatment. Nothing was working, and it was making him very sick on top of the tumor being active.’
Laura said it was encouraged that Ryan be put in a hospice facility, but she refused.
‘I said, I’m gonna bring him home. We’re gonna bring a bed down, we’re gonna put it in the living room, and I’m gonna take care of him,’ she said.
‘So a bunch of my cousins and friends and his brothers brought basically our bedroom down to the living room, and he survived 13 days on hospice.’
In his last days, Laura said they had ’20, 30 people in and out of the house every night, visiting, taking care of him with me, saying everything they wanted to say, and it was brutal to watch your loved one just laying there, suffering.’
Laura now has a new partner named Dave, who she started dating in December and describes as ‘one of the best things that’s ever happened to me’
‘But at the same time, you’re like, this is not a quality of life, he’s suffering. I hate to say I’m suffering because I’m not the one going through it, but I’m suffering for him, and I’m sick over it and it’s just awful.
‘So the last two days he wasn’t really lucid, but I could sit next to him and talk with him and say things. We played his favorite movies the last few weeks, his favorite music. He couldn’t eat anymore, I was feeding him Italian ice and his favorite ice-cream, you know, whatever I don’t care, give him whatever he wants.
‘He loved his mint chocolate chip ice-cream by Oberweis and [we] made the best experience of the worst experience you can imagine.
‘I think that’s all you can do ’cause me running around like a crazy person crying and screaming would never have helped the situation. I know people handle things differently. But I knew I had to be strong for him and for me, because of being in the ER, a couple of times, just from getting sick from lack of sleep, not eating right, tough times to go through, but at the end, you almost feel relieved.’
Ryan died on April 29, 2015 at the age of 39.
As for how she navigated her grief following his death, she said that she had some closure and was as prepared as she could be after spending nine months coming to terms with it, but she admitted ‘you’re never fully prepared.’
‘But having that really made a different because some people lose people suddenly. I lost my dad suddenly, he passed of a heart attack when I was nine, and then I had no closure. And I lost Ryan over time; he was suffering, but I had closure,’ she said.
‘They’re both bad for different reasons. But I always say you have two choices, you can keep your head up, be positive, and do what that person would want you to do. Would Ryan want me wallowing and sad all the time, and not moving forward? No, that would hurt him even more. He was so worried about me before he passed, so I had to know I had to do for me, for him, even for my mother.
‘My mother’s battled MS (multiple sclerosis) since I was a kid, and now she has Parkinson’s on top of it, so I have to be the strong one still.’
Reflecting the aftermath of Ryan’s death, Laura said what helped her was surrounding herself with family and friends, but she ‘might have done a little too much’ after he passed away.
‘I broke all the rules. They say, don’t get into a relationship, don’t buy a home, don’t make big decisions, don’t start a business, don’t do that, I did all of it in six months,’ she confessed.
‘I’m like I was dating someone, I was buying a townhouse and cut the lease on our rental home that we had. A year later I started a business, and sometimes they say, don’t do any of those things in five years, and I did them in six months to a year, but it helped me so, for me it was therapeutic to stay busy, stay social.
‘Don’t recede from people, stay around people… People handle things different, there’s no wrong or right way, but for me it worked to be with people.’
Laura said she wanted to share her story because she wanted people to know ‘you can come out of those tough times with the right attitude and the right outlook.’
She now runs her own successful business, Laura Orrico Public Relations, LLC, a path she decided to pursue that was partly inspired by her late husband after deciding to stay in Chicago to be around her family and friends.
The agency celebrates its eighth anniversary this month.
‘I decided I would do something different, and I could hear Ryan’s words, things he would always say to me, “Pick up the phone and call so and so [to] let people know what you’re doing and what you want,” because that’s how you progress by networking and communicating with people. So that’s basically things like that, he would say to me,’ Laura said of her new career direction.
‘And it was funny because no one was going to hire an actress for whatever career I wanted to try to get into, so a friend hired me to do PR for him, and I loved it. I was his publicist for a few months, and then it just parlayed into me doing it for other people. More people started to hear what I was doing.’
It was in 2016, on April 4 (Ryan’s birthday), that she officially started her PR firm that represents clients across the country.
‘I really credit Ryan’s positivity and motivation for all the struggles that he went through, and all of his support and encouragement that he gave me throughout my entire career, allowing me to work full time and pursue my acting career while we lived out in LA,’ she said.
Laura is set to appear in a new David Leo Schultz called The Buddy Cop and has produced a TV pilot with celebrity chef Robbie Shoults that she’s working on getting picked up.
She also has a new partner named Dave, who she started dating in December and describes as ‘one of the best things that’s ever happened to me’ after two other relationships didn’t work out.
‘I was hoping to find my person again and start a family and start a life again, and be able to live my second phase of my life. And I ended up meeting someone absolutely amazing,’ the PR mogul gushed.