Busy Philipps, best known to many fans for Dawson’s Creek, has shared that doctors recently found a rare brain tumour.
The 47-year-old actress said the diagnosis came in February, after she went ahead with a full-body MRI scan one day after her former co-star James Van Der Beek died from colon cancer.
Philipps had surgery in early March, only weeks before she was due to begin work on her new show Cupertino. Reflecting on the ordeal, she said, “I’m grateful that I’m alive,” describing the past several months as “the weirdest six months of my life.”
The actress said she had experienced no warning signs before doctors identified the grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a rare, slow-growing brain tumor diagnosed in roughly 1,100 to 1,300 people in the United States each year.
The growth was detected only because Philipps decided to book the MRI, a screening that looks for more than 500 possible conditions, after first learning about it through Instagram.
In an interview with People Magazine, Philipps opened up about the emotional timing of her health scare. She said her appointment had originally been set for January, but a blizzard forced her to reschedule it for February 12 — the day after her friend James died.
Dawson’s Creek actress Busy Philipps has disclosed that she was diagnosed with a rare brain tumour
Philipps said she spoke with her ex-husband and close friend Marc Silverstein about whether she should cancel the scan, as she was dealing with grief over James while also juggling a demanding work schedule.
But Marc told her James would want her to find out more about her health. ‘He’s like, ‘Maybe it’s the best thing you could do for your friend this morning. Go get that scan.”
The scan showed a lesion on her brain but thankfully glioblastoma, an aggressive cancerous tumor with no cure, was quickly ruled out.
Her doctor instructed her to get a follow-up MRI as early as possible to get a better look at the lesion. She recalled the phone call when her doctor told her “This is a real tumor, and it’s inside your brain. And Busy, it’s got to come out,” I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe.’
The actress underwent a five-hour procedure a month later to remove the 2.6 centimeter tumour, with Marc, who is the father of her daughters Birdie, 17, and Cricket, 13, supporting her at the hospital.
Busy recalled telling her daughters about the diagnosis and her eldest ‘was kind of beside herself and really, really scared and overwhelmed with emotion’.
‘I just kept saying to her, “Birdie, you’re just not in the movie where your mom dies your senior year of high school. That’s just not the movie that you’re in. I promise you.”‘
Meanwhile, Cricket’s ‘reaction when I told her was like, “Okay. You’re going to be fine?” And I was like, “I’m totally going to be fine.”
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The actress, 47, was diagnosed in February after undergoing a full-body MRI scan the day after her co-star Janes Van Der Beek’s death from colon cancer
The tumour was biopsied and it was discovered to be malignant, with her doctor advising ‘it has the best prognosis of all of the malignant gliomas.’
In April though, Busy was back in hospital after she contracted staphylococcus in her incision, undergoing another surgery to clear the infection.
The infection was discovered when Busy’s dermatologist noticed the incision site didn’t look right during a Botox appointment.
‘The second surgery really threw me. I just felt like I was back to square one, and I was really, really upset,’ Busy, who had just started filming her new show at the time, admitted.
She has now reflected that some of her ‘extreme emotional reactions’ she’d been experiencing over the past couple of years were a result of the tumor pressing on her frontal lobe, and not perimenopause as she’d always assumed.
Whilst her doctors can’t be sure if these were symptoms, Busy’s best friend and Dawson’s co-star Michelle Williams, who helped take care of her after her surgery, pointed out to her:
She underwent a five-hour procedure in March to remove the 2.6 centimeter tumour, with Marc, who is the father of Busy’s daughters Birdie, 17, and Cricket, 13, supporting her
”Busy, you have been saying for the past two years, My brain feels broken.’ And she was right. I have. I’ve been saying this for the last few years. . . . I wasn’t consciously aware that anything was really wrong, but there was something that was misfiring.’
‘Like, I could not get a handle on it. My brain does not feel broken anymore.’
Speaking on Instagram on Wednesday, Busy explained that she had been keeping her loved ones up to date over the past six months via the Close Friends function on Instagram.
She said she wanted to keep the news to her inner circle in order to protect her daughters from ‘having to deal with the added insanity of their mom talking about it publicly.’
She added that she also had to start filming her show Cupertino ‘just four and a half weeks’ after her first surgery ‘and I just had to f**king lock in and just get through it.’
