Dawson’s Creek star Busy Philip has revealed that she has been diagnosed with a rare brain tumor.
The 47-year-old actress was diagnosed in February after undergoing a full-body MRI scan the day after her co-star Jacobus Van Der Beek‘s death by colon cancer at the age of 48.
She underwent surgery in early March, just weeks before she started filming her new show Cupertino, and admitted: “I’m grateful to be alive,” adding that it’s been “the weirdest six months of my life.”
Druk said she had no symptoms from the grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a rare, slow-growing tumor found in only 1,100 to 1,300 people per year in the US.
The lesion was only discovered after she was inspired to undergo the MRI scan, which was more than checked 500 conditions, after reading about it on Instagram.
Speak with People magazine Regarding her health concerns, Busy explained how her scan was initially planned for January, but a snowstorm forced her to move the appointment to February 12, the day after her boyfriend James died.
Dawson’s Creek star Busy Philipps has revealed she has been diagnosed with a rare brain tumor
In conversation with her ex-husband and close friend, Marc Silverstein, she considered canceling the scan due to her grief for James and a busy work period.
But Marc told her that James would want her to learn more about her health. ‘He said, ‘Maybe this is the best thing you can do for your friend this morning. Go get that scan.’
The scan showed a lesion in her brain, but fortunately glioblastoma, an aggressive cancerous tumor with no cure, was quickly ruled out.
Her doctor instructed her to have a follow-up MRI as soon as possible to get a better look at the lesion. She remembered the phone call when her doctor told her, “This is a real tumor and it’s in your brain. And Pressure, it has to come out,” and she said, “I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe.”
The actress underwent a five-hour procedure to remove the 2.6cm tumor a month later, with Marc, father of her daughters Birdie, 17, and Cricket, 13, supporting her in hospital.
Busy recalled telling her daughters about the diagnosis and that her eldest was “a little beside herself and very scared and overwhelmed with emotions.”
“I kept telling 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 you’re in. I promise you that.’
Meanwhile, Cricket’s ‘rThe reaction when I told her was, “Okay. You’re going to be okay?’ And I thought, ‘I’m going to be just fine.’”
The 47-year-old actress was diagnosed in February after undergoing a full-body MRI scan the day after her co-star James Van Der Beek’s death from colon cancer.
A biopsy of the tumor was performed and it was discovered to be malignant, with her doctor advising ‘that it has the best prognosis of all malignant gliomas’.
Busy does not need chemotherapy or radiotherapy, but is given regular scans to check for a possible recurrence, with her doctor noting that ‘she has a really good chance of this not happening again’.
In April, Busy was back in the hospital after contracting staph in her incision and undergoing another surgery to cure the infection.
The infection was discovered when Busy’s dermatologist noticed that the incision site did not look good during a Botox appointment.
‘The second operation really threw me off. I felt like I was back at square one, and I was really, really upset,” admitted Busy, who had just started filming her new show at the time.
She has now realized that some of the “extreme emotional reactions” she had experienced in recent years were due to the tumor pressing on her frontal lobe, and not from perimenopause as she had always assumed.
Although her doctors can’t be sure if these were symptoms, Busy’s best friend and Dawson’s co-star Michelle Williams, who helped her after her surgery, pointed out the following:
She underwent a five-hour procedure to remove the 2.6cm tumor in March, with Marc, father of Busy’s daughters Birdie, 17, and Cricket, 13, supporting her.
“Busy, you’ve been saying for two years, my brain feels broken.” And she was right. I have. I’ve been saying this for a few years…I wasn’t aware that anything was really wrong, but there was something that wasn’t right.’
‘For example, I couldn’t get a grip on it. My brain doesn’t feel broken anymore.’
Busy explained on Instagram on Wednesday that she had been keeping her loved ones in the loop for the past six months through Instagram’s Close Friends feature.
She said she wanted to keep the news within her circle to protect her daughters from “the added craziness of their mother 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 lock in and just get through it.”
Busy also told her followers how grateful she was that she decided to have the MRI scan, admitting: “To be honest I didn’t even have a job when I did it and I was kind of like ‘this is a stupid amount of money I’m spending’ but I did it anyway.”
Though she’s only just publicly revealed her diagnosis, Busy hinted at her health struggles in a March 19 Instagram post, writing that it had been “literally the weirdest 2.5 weeks of my life.”
‘I can’t wait to write book 2…. this is what i know. I know this: I love my daughters. i love my friends. i love my dog and cats. I love my ex husband (legal husband still lol) if I hate war and the cold and I’m ready for that to be over, but seriously, how lucky are we to have anything at all?’
‘Just existing is a gift. happy new moon. plant the seeds. let’s move on. hand on my heart. hand on my stupid heart.’
