Amanda Peet has opened up about her breast cancer diagnosis.
Peet wrote an essay titled My Season of Ativan for The New Yorker to reveal her breast cancer diagnosis.
The 54-year-old American actress shared that her breast cancer surgeon used to check her twice a year and went for a routine scan before Labour Day last year.
She penned, “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,” the Brockmire star said.
An initial report confirmed a small tumor, and then she got an MRI and further testing done to learn about her receptor status, as it “indicates how tough your strain of cancer is. It’s like dogs. You have poodles on one end and, on the other, pit bulls” said Peet.
The Identity star and her husband, David Benioff, the co-creator of Game of Thrones, waited for her test results.
After a long wait, Peet was informed about being “hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative,” both of which are more favorable for treatment.
“You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy. I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer. But after about ten minutes I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror … It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip,” she explained.
It is pertinent to mention that a radiologist discovered another mass in the same breast which the MRI failed to highlight that delayed her planned lumpectomy because an MRI-guided biopsy was ordered.
Notably, Peet’s cancer diagnosis came during the same time when both of her parents were undergoing hospice care on opposite coasts.