Your Friends & Neighbors star Amanda Peet has revealed she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer.
The actress detailed her experience leading up to and following her diagnosis in an essay for The New Yorker, which came as both of her parents were in hospice.
Peet began the essay by recounting the myriad of close memories she has with her mother, whom she “told everything.” She wrote, “So it was strange not to tell her, last fall, that I’d been diagnosed with cancer.”
“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,” she continued. “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. 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 following day, her doctor shared a preliminary report: “The tumor ‘appeared’ to be small, but I would need an MRI after the holiday weekend to determine ‘the extent of disease.’ On Tuesday, we would also learn my receptor status, which indicates how tough your strain of cancer is. ‘It’s like dogs,’ she explained. ‘You have poodles on one end and, on the other, pit bulls.’”
After learning of the diagnosis, Peet’s close family and friends rallied around her, but refrained from telling her mother due to her Parkinson’s disease, she said. “My mom lived in a cottage twenty feet from our kitchen, but it didn’t cross my mind to go tell her because she was in the final stage of Parkinson’s disease,” Peet wrote. “She still recognized me, and sometimes answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to my questions, but always reverted to an empty stare.”
Shortly after, Peet’s sister shared news that their father was in ill health. “My sister called: our father was about to die. Our parents, long divorced, were both in hospice, on opposite coasts. 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 wrote.
Peet explained that she did “not make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment.” She recounted the feelings of seeing her father after his death, adding, “I felt guilty for not crying, but at least I got a reprieve from guessing how much longer I had to live.”
The Fatal Attraction actress noted that while “my mind should’ve been flooded with memories” of her father after his death, her mind was consumed with thoughts about her own health.
“As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again,” she wrote.
Amid juggling her health, Peet and her sister grappled with telling her mother the news of their father’s death. “My sister and I toyed with the idea of telling her that our dad had died, but it was impossible to gauge how much she could comprehend,” she wrote, adding that as her mother’s health had declined over the past few years, “our talks had become shorter and shorter until I was only giving her positive, bite-size updates about my life.”
Peet’s doctor soon after gave her an update, texting, “All poodle features!” This meant her breast cancer was treatable.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
Peet noted that a radiologist went on to find a second mass in the same breast. Then, she had to endure an MRI-guided biopsy, which she described as “when a tumor sample is extracted while you’re inside the big white imaging doughnut.” She recounted the experience in the essay, adding that, “As I left, the doctor told me it was fifty-fifty whether or not there was more cancer.”
“Two days later, we found out that the second mass was benign, and that I would only need a lumpectomy and radiation, not a double mastectomy or chemo,” Peet wrote, which led the actress and her husband to tell their children about their mother’s diagnosis.
In January, two weeks after Peet had “my first clear scan,” the hospice nurse suggested she call the mortuary, and “told me that my mom was going to die in a matter of days and that most people find it too painful to make arrangements in the immediate aftermath.”
The actress movingly recounted spending time with her mother before she passed: “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.”
