Photo: Earl Gibson III/Deadline via Getty Images
In an emotional essay for The New Yorker published on Saturday, Amanda Peet revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer last fall. The actress shared that she received her diagnosis while both of her parents were in hospice on opposite coasts with her father dying shortly after her surgeon sent her biopsy results.
Peet wrote that she had been told for years that her breasts “require extra monitoring,” leading to checkups with a breast surgeon every six months. It was at one of these appointments where she learned that something was wrong.
“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,” Peet wrote. “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.”
A preliminary report showed that Peet had a breast tumor that “appeared” small, but she would have to wait to undergo more scans. She wrote that she then flew to New York to be with her father, who died before she arrived. Once back in Los Angeles, her doctor informed her that her breast cancer was “HER2-negative,” meaning that the cancer cells didn’t contain high levels of the protein human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, which can fuel cancer growth, per the Mayo Clinic.
Peet wrote that she was “happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis,” to the point where “you’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy.” After that, an MRI-guided biopsy revealed that a second mass was benign. Peet’s cancer was stage one and did not require chemotherapy or a mastectomy, and she underwent a lumpectomy and radiation instead.
In January, Peet received her first clean scan. A few weeks later, her mother’s hospice nurse told Peet that her mom was “going to die in a matter of days” and that she should start making arrangements. Peet, who wrote that she usually told her mother everything, hadn’t shared her diagnosis while her mother was in hospice in the final stage of Parkinson’s disease.
“I wasn’t sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting, disembodied shapes,” Peet wrote. “I said ‘howdy doodle’—that’s how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything.”
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