Amanda Peet is opening up about how she shared 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 cocreator David Benioff.
“They’ve been great. I definitely had to get myself together before including them,” Peet told E! News in an interview published on Tuesday, March 24.
She added, “The hard part was realizing that nothing is certain and there was going to be no perfect time to tell them.”
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Peet first revealed her breast cancer diagnosis in an emotional essay for The New Yorker published on Saturday, March 21, noting that she got the news “last fall.”
“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 & Neighbors actress wrote. “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 undergoing a biopsy, Peet learned that she had 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’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer,” Peet wrote. “But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror. [My doctor,] Dr. K., said 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.”
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Peet’s medical team found a second benign mass in her breast, which required a lumpectomy and radiation treatment, she said.
Peet was being treated for cancer while both of her parents were in hospice care. Her mother died in January as the actress received her “first clear scan.”
“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,” Peet wrote of her final moments with her mom. “We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes.”
“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. 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,” she said.
