Amanda Peet revealed that a breast cancer diagnosis last fall came amid an already difficult time.
“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,” the “Your Friends and Neighbors” star wrote in a New Yorker essay published on Saturday.
She added, “I 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.”
After a doctor “didn’t like the way something looked” on an ultrasound, she had 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,” she explained, noting that results were shared with her the following day.
“The tumor ‘appeared’ to be small, but I would need an MRI after the holiday weekend to determine ‘the extent of disease,’” Peet went on.
To make matters even more difficult, her “long divorced” parents were in hospice “on opposite coasts,” she wrote.
“Our mother’s had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first,” she continued, referencing her sister.
“I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment.”
Peet — who married David Benioff in 2006 and has since welcomed three children with him — learned that her stage I diagnosis was “hormone-receptor-positive” and “HER2-negative” upon arriving back in Los Angeles.
She noted that she was “happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer.”
“But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror,” she explained.
Her doctor then told her that “the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as ‘the left side for any surprise findings’ and call with the results within a week. It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”
Another benign mass was located in her breast, and a lumpectomy and radiation would be the treatment.
The “Saving Silverman” actress then recounted her final, tender moments with her mother, who died in January.
“The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision,” she wrote.
“We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes.”
After the intimate revelations, friend Sarah Paulson gushed over the essay in a social media post on Saturday.
“My best friend, Amanda Peet—the weirdest thing in the world is to say her full name out loud, as I call her Bird—but that’s the name her parents gave her,” Paulson captioned a photo of the magazine article.
“Seems fitting to use here as she has written the most profoundly gorgeous essay about the loss of her parents, while dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis.”
The “American Horror Story” actress continued, saying that she’s “screaming from the rooftops with joy.”
“My friend is a @newyorkermag essayist. How outrageously groovy is that? Bird, I love you beyond,” she concluded the post.
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