Actress Reveals She Was Diagnosed With Breast Cancer While Both Her Parents Were in Hospice

Amanda Peet is opening up about the devastating experience of losing both of her parents while dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis.

The Your Friends & Neighbors actress, 54, penned an emotional essay for The New Yorker published on Saturday in which she revealed her Stage 1 breast cancer diagnosis as she spoke candidly about watching her parents die in separate hospices.

Peet revealed that when she went in for a routine breast scan six months ago, her doctor told her 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,” the actress continued. “That’s when I knew.”

The results of Peet’s biopsy revealed that she had a “small” tumor in her breast, with doctors conducting further testing to “determine the extent of the disease.”

At the same time, Peet’s parents were both in hospice care “on opposite coasts,” and after her first round of tests, Peet revealed that her father took a turn for the worse in 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,” she wrote. “As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again.”

Upon her return to Los Angeles, Peet revealed she was told that her breast cancer was HER2-negative, which meant that the cancerous cells in her breast didn’t contain excess levels of the protein human epidermal growth factor 2, which fuels cancer growth, as per the Mayo Clinic.

“You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy. I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis…,” Peet recalled of learning her diagnosis. “But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror. Dr. K. said that the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as ‘the left side for any surprise findings’ …. It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”

While the radiologist didn’t find evidence that the cancer had traveled to her lymph nodes, a “second mass” was found in her breast, which required more testing. The second mass was then ultimately determined to be benign, meaning that the Whole Nine Yards actress required “a lumpectomy and radiation, not a double mastectomy or chemotherapy.”

In mid-January, Peet received her “first clear scan,” but just days later, her mother died in hospice after a long journey from Parkinson’s disease. This time, Peet was able to be with her mom in her final moments.