Actress Amanda Peet announced she has been diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer.
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In an essay that The New Yorker recently published, the Your Friends and Neighbors star opened up about being diagnosed with breast cancer last fall.
While speaking about her cancer journey, Peet said she had been told “for many years” that her breasts “required extra monitoring” and had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checks.
“The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan. Dr. K. … told me that she didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy,” she explained. “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’s doctor discovered a “small” tumor in her breast. Following the discovery, the actress had an MRI to “determine the extent of the disease.”
The Actress’ Parents Were In Separate Hospices When She Received the Diagnosis
As she was going through her health woes, Peet said her parents were dying in hospices “on opposite coasts.”
After completing the first round of tests, Peet flew to New York to be with her father, whose health quickly declined. He passed away before she arrived.
Following her return to Los Angeles, the actress’s doctor officially diagnosed her with HER2-negative.
“You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy. I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis,” she said. “But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror. Dr. K. said that the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as ‘the left side for any surprise findings’ …. It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”
Although her radiologist did not see evidence of lymph-node involvement, they did discover a “second mass” in the same breast in which her initial tumor was found. Thankfully, the mass was “benign.”
Due to being stage 1 breast cancer, it was required for Peet to have a lumpetomy and radiation. However, she was not advised to have a double mastectomy or chemotherapy.
In mid-January, Peet received her “first clear scan.” Her mother, who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease, died in hospice days later.