Amanda Peet reveals breast cancer diagnosis

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Amanda Peet reveals breast cancer diagnosis

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Writer: Heidi Hsia

Amanda Peet opens up about navigating illness, loss and family

24 Mar - Amanda Peet recently opened up about her health situation, revealing that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

The actress, who became famous after starring in "The Whole Nine Yards," detailed her diagnosis in an essay for The New Yorker, where she also spoke about having both her parents in hospice care while getting the bad news.

"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," she said, adding that she had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups.

"The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan. Dr. K. usually chatted me up while she examined me, but this time she went silent. She told me that she didn't like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy. 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."

After getting her diagnosis, Peet said that her close family and friends rallied around her, and that it was only after her father's death that she truly had the time to focus on her own health situation. She even researched about it online despite promising her husband, "Game of Thrones" showrunner David Benioff that she would stay off the Internet.

Peet said that doctors later discovered a second tumour in the same breast that was determined to be benign, only requiring a lumpectomy and radiation instead of chemotherapy or a mastectomy.

Amanda Peet in "Fantasy Life"

Her mother passed away soon after and that the funeral was held two weeks after Peet's first clear scan.

The actress later told her children about the diagnosis, saying, "Molly cried, and Frankie − FaceTiming from her college quad − clapped her hand over her mouth and kept it there until she was able to process the excellent portion of the news: that it appeared I was Stage I and wasn't going to need chemo. Both of them were afraid that we were still withholding information or sugarcoating my prognosis," she wrote.

"My daughters were on the cusp of adulthood. If we were going to remain close, to know each other deeply over the course of a lifetime, we would have to learn how to have difficult conversations."