Shannen Doherty just wants to make it through another couple years.
The actress recently revealed on her podcast, Let’s Be Clear, that a minor head injury helped doctors discover that her stage 4 breast cancer had spread to her brain.
“The funny story behind this is that I kind of bumped my head after a Christmas party,” she said during the episode featuring her oncologist, Dr. Lawrence Piro.
The doctor quickly ordered a CT scan of her head, which is when they found a tumor.
The tumor’s discovery was fortunate, because Piro insisted that Doherty didn’t have symptoms that indicated cancer in the brain.
“You weren’t exhibiting any signs of trouble. You weren’t paralyzed. You weren’t having seizures,” Piro recalled.
The CT scan revealed some metastases of cancer in the brain, so Piro scheduled surgery, which the actress underwent in January 2023.
“I was at Cedar Sinai getting my head cut open and a tumor (was found),” Shannen said in the podcast episode. “We got almost all of (it), and the rest we handled with brain radiation.”
Doherty was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 and went into remission in 2017.
Doherty announced that the cancer had returned as stage 4 three years later, and in November 2023, she revealed the cancer had spread to her bones.
To make matters even worse, her cancer wasn’t the only hardship Shannen was dealing with during this time.
On an episode of her podcast last month, the actress revealed that she went into surgery to remove a brain tumor after learning that her 11-year marriage to her third husband, Kurt Iswarienko, was “essentially over.”
“I went into that surgery early in the morning and I went in after I found out that my marriage was essentially over, that my husband had been carrying on an affair for two years,” she said.
“To not go in that surgery, even though, being very clear, he wanted to go, I couldn’t go into that surgery with him there,” she continued. “I felt so betrayed.”
The Charmed actress said that she discovered Iswarienko had been cheating on her for many months.
“At the end of the day, I just felt so incredibly unloved by someone I was with for 14 years, by someone I loved with all my heart,” Doherty continued.
“Just to have to go through all of that while trying to figure out if you’re going to get a f***ing divorce and trying to get to the truth of that,” she added.
Now, with all of that behind her, Shannen is hopeful that future advancements in medicine will allow her to live a longer life.
“I always talk about the fact that we just need to squeeze out another three to five years, and then there’s going to be T-cell therapy or there’s going to be this,” she said on her podcast.
“There’s going to be a lot more options that will give another five years.”
“Then in those five years, there’s a whole other group of options, and eventually there’s going to be a cure,” she added.
Doherty’s oncologist went on to use an analogy of horse racing to describe how cancer patients may use one treatment to hold out for another emerging treatment.
“I always say that it’s important to think of each therapy as a horse,” Dr. Lawrence Piro began.
“In a horse race, you want to ride every horse as long as it rides, and then you ride the next horse as much as possible,” he explained.
Piro continued, “You hope you make it a few laps then there’s altogether another new set of horses to ride, to make the race that much longer.”
The actress following by praising Dr. Piro’s analogy, saying that is exactly what she’s trying to do with her treatment.
“I’m riding those horses so I get to the fresh set of horses, and I’m trying to get the one I’m on right now to last for as long as humanly possible,” she insisted.
Despite all of the serious treatments Doherty has been going through, she launched her podcast in late November, releasing new episodes every week.
“I don’t want to die,” she told PEOPLE in an interview following the launch of her podcast.
“I’m not done with living, I’m not done with loving, I’m not done with creating, I’m not done with, hopefully changing things for the better. I’m just not done,” she added. “My greatest memory is yet to come.”
