Lifetime achievement for the ‘flashy girl from Flushing’

Fran Drescher is best known for her television sitcom role in which her character was charged with keeping things tidy at the Sheffields’ home in “The Nanny.” Now, as a cancer survivor for 14 years, Drescher has dedicated her life to motivating people to tidy up their own homes by removing items that contain carcinogens.

Drescher, a Queens native, addressed roughly 500 cancer survivors on Oct. 7 at the fourth annual Breast Cancer Summit at the Coral House in Baldwin. The Long Island Plastic Surgical Group honored her with a lifetime achievement award for her advocacy and dedication to raising cancer awareness.

In 2007, Drescher launched the Cancer Schmancer Movement, an organization that aims to educate people on the importance of early cancer detection, and urges them to be conscious of what they eat and put on their skin, and how both can potentially lead to a cancer diagnosis. She wrote a book in 2002, “Cancer Schmancer,” detailing her plight in getting properly diagnosed — ultimately with uterine cancer — and her new outlook on life after she beat the disease.

“I got famous, I got cancer and I lived to talk about it,” she said in the Coral House ballroom, which was packed with survivors, balloons and pink tablecloths. “So I’m talking.”

According to the Cancer Schmancer website, 90 percent of cancer cases are related to the environment. The organization started the Detox Your Home initiative in 2012, to encourage people to “eliminate harmful toxins in our food, the cosmetics in our skin, and cleaners around our homes,” the website states.

Drescher encouraged her audience to change their purchasing habits. “We can use consumerism to dictate manufacturing trends instead of waiting years for regulation,” she said.

Sprinkling her presentation with one-liners and giving the crowd a sample of her famous laugh, she explained that her own experience — going through eight doctors in two years before getting a proper diagnosis — inspired her to write “Cancer Schmancer.” But while she was on her book tour, she recognized how common her story was. “What I realized was what happened to me is not really not that unique — that people are misdiagnosed and mistreated constantly,” she said.