Entertainment
Actress Amanda Peet Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis
Amanda Peet has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“For many years, I’ve been told that I have ‘dense’ and ‘busy’ breasts — not as a compliment but as a warning that they require extra monitoring,” Peet wrote in a New Yorker essay published Saturday, March 21, revealing she was diagnosed “last fall.”
“I had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups,” she continued. “The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan.”
According to Peet, her physician “didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound” and, as a result, wanted the actress to undergo a biopsy.
Many celebrities have spoken out about their personal battles with breast cancer over the years. Julia Louis-Dreyfus went public with her breast cancer diagnosis in September 2017 via Instagram. Nearly one year later, she had successfully beaten the illness and returned to work on Veep. “It sounds kind of corny, but there’s something about after […]
“After the procedure, she said that she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it to Pathology. That’s when I knew,” Peet said, noting that her doctor shared the results the next day. “The tumor ‘appeared’ to be small, but I would need an MRI after the holiday weekend to determine ‘the extent of disease.’”
As Peet waited to discover the type of cancer she had, her parents were both on hospice care.
“Our parents, long divorced, were both in hospice, on opposite coasts,” she wrote, referring to her sister. “Our mother’s had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first. I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment.”
Peet returned home to Los Angeles to consider caring for her mom, when she learned that her stage I cancer was “hormone-receptor-positive” and “HER2-negative.”
Many celebrities have spoken out about their personal battles with breast cancer over the years. Julia Louis-Dreyfus went public with her breast cancer diagnosis in September 2017 via Instagram. Nearly one year later, she had successfully beaten the illness and returned to work on Veep. “It sounds kind of corny, but there’s something about after […]
“I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer,” Peet said. “But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror. [My doctor,] Dr. K., said that the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as ‘the left side for any surprise findings’ and call with the results within a week. It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”
Doctors soon discovered a second benign mass in Peet’s breast, requiring a lumpectomy and radiation as treatment.
Peet’s mother died in January shortly after her own “first clear scan.”
“The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision,” Peet said of her final moments with her mom. “We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes.”
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