Marcia Cross Reveals She Is Now Healthy After Anal Cancer: 'So Grateful and Happy to Be Alive'

Marcia Cross is “happy” to be healthy again after undergoing treatment for anal cancer — though she wishes her hair would grow back.

The former Desperate Housewives star lamented her hair loss in an Instagram post on Sept. 15, and later explained that she is in recovery from cancer.

“So grateful and happy to be alive but sad that my hair fell out and is about 1 inch long now and looks cra cra,” Cross, 56, wrote. “Anyone else have #hairloss due to #cancer? Talk to me. I feel you.”

After her fans responded with concern that Cross was still sick, she clarified the next day that she is now better.

“I am so sorry my post wasn’t clear,” she wrote. “I am POST cancer. All good now. Hard journey, but I am HEALTHY, happy, and more present and grateful than ever. Thank you from the bottom of my ever expanding heart for all of your LOVE.”

And Cross wrote in a third post that finally revealing her cancer battle publicly was a huge relief.

“After posting a picture of myself here and uttering the words #cancer and #hairloss, I felt liberated, deliriously free and completely me,” she said. “How or why this simple act gave me such a powerful lift I did not question, but I thanked God or whatever gave me the internal push to move forward and expose myself.”

Cross, who recently played the President of the United States on Quantico, said that she was amazed by everyone’s well-wishes.

“I certainly wasn’t expecting the response of love and kindness that flowed to me,” she said. “My capacity to receive requires a massive expansion! I am ecstatically alive and what interests me post-cancer is #AUTHENTICITY. #VULNERABILITY. #TRANSPARENCY. And of course #LOVE.”

“If you were wondering,” she added, “I had #analcancer. I know, right?!”

Cross has a family history with cancer — her husband, Tom Mahoney, was in treatment for an unnamed cancer in 2009, and is now healthy. She told PEOPLE in 2010 that she decided not to tell her then-3-year-old twin girls Eden and Savannah about his treatment.

“There’s no point in telling our kids,” she said. “They were so young and anything to them is normal, so they didn’t know things weren’t normal. They’re enjoying their life. Daddy’s fine. It’s in the past.”