Amanda Peet she opens up about how she shared the news of her breast cancer diagnosis with her three children.
The actress, 54, shares daughters Frances, 19, and Molly, 15, and son Henry, 11, with her husband, Game of Thrones producer David Benioff.
“They were going great. I definitely had to get them together before I got them together,” Peet told E! News in an interview published on Tuesday, March 24.
He added, “The difficult thing was to realize that nothing is certain and we won't have enough time to tell them.”
Peet began revealing her breast cancer diagnosis in her journal The New Yorker published on Saturday, March 21, notes that he received the news “last fall.”
“I've been told for years that I have 'dense' and 'busy' breasts – not as a compliment but as a warning that they need extra care,” Your Friends and Neighbors the actor wrote. “I've been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups. The Friday before Labor Day, I went in for what I thought would be a routine scan.”
After a biopsy, Peet was diagnosed with stage I cancer, which was hormone-receptor-positive and HER2-negative. According to the Mayo Clinic, this is the most common type of breast cancer.
“I was happier than I had ever been before, when I was a normal person without cancer,” Peet wrote. But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed an MRI and it was back to basic fear. [My doctor,] Dr. K., said the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as 'the left side for any unexpected findings' and call me with the results within a week. It dawned on me that cancer comes in a slow drip.”
Sarah Paulson marveled at how her longtime friend Amanda Peet summed up her recent battle with cancer. “My best friend, Amanda Peet … wrote the most beautiful essay about losing her parents, while dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis,” Paulson, 51, wrote on Instagram on Saturday, March 21. “@newyorkermag published it. […]
Peet's medical team found a second mass in her breast, which required a lumpectomy and radiation therapy, he said.
Peet was being treated for cancer while both of his parents were in hospice care. His mother died in January as the actor received his “first clear scan.”
“The morphine was taking a long time to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and crying, so I climbed into her rented hospital bed to get her perspective,” Peet wrote of her last moments with her mother. “We closed our eyes and he was silent, and he and I continued to look at each other for a few minutes.”
“I wasn't sure if my mother knew she was looking at me or if I was just a star with attractive, different body shapes. I said, 'Howdy doodle'—she used to greet me like that. But then I realized she was talking without speaking, and I did the same. Time was passing, and, besides, I had already told her everything,” he said.
