Dawson’s Creek actress Busy Philipps, 47, shares brain tumour diagnosis after 'secret' surgery
Dawson's Creek actress Busy Philipps has revealed that she secretly underwent surgery earlier this year after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.
The 47-year-old shared the shock news with PEOPLE Magazine on Wednesday (26 August) and said she's 'grateful to be alive' after 'the weirdest six months of my life'.
Philipps was diagnosed with grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a rare slow-growing tumour, in February, after getting a full-body Prenuvo MRI scan.
Despite being told by her primary care doctor that there was 'no need' because she’s young and healthy, she followed her instincts and booked in the appointment.
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She told the outlet: "I didn’t know why I wanted to get this scan except for the fact that I just did" and admitted she had no obvious symptoms, but had seen the scans advertised on social media.
After the scan, the star recalled her doctor telling her: “‘This is a real tumor, and it’s inside your brain. And Busy, it’s got to come out," she added, "I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe.”
In March, Philipps underwent a five-hour-long procedure, during which the 2.6cm mass in her brain was removed, biopsied and discovered to be an oligodendroglioma.
As per Cancer Research UK, oligodendrogliomas are a type of brain tumour that belongs to a group of brain tumours called gliomas.
Common symptoms are seizures (fits), headaches, weakness and numbness in your arms and legs, and feeling or being sick.
They are rare, and roughly three out of every 100 primary brain tumours (about 3%) diagnosed in England between 1995 and 2017 were oligodendrogliomas.
Philipps' news came just as she was due to start filming her CBS TV show Cupertino, and she had to tell her daughters Birdie, 18, and Cricket, 13, about her diagnosis.
She recalled that Birdie was 'kind of beside herself and really, really scared and overwhelmed with emotion'.
The Cougar Town actress said: "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.’ ”
The scan also came just a day after her Dawson’s Creek co-star James Van Der Beek tragically died of colon cancer.
After her surgery, Philipps started her 'dream' job in Cupertino, but faced a frightening setback when she went to get Botox from her dermatologist, who saw the incision site from the surgery and said it 'didn't look good'.
The star recalled: "She’s like, ‘That doesn’t look right. I’m not going to touch it….Can I take a picture of it and will you send it to your surgeons right now?’...And I did and they immediately were like, ‘That doesn’t look good.'"
As per PEOPLE, she saw a wound care specialist who put her on antibiotics before she ended up back in hospital having contracted staphylococcus in her incision.
Philipps needed debridement surgery to clear it and remove one of the titanium tacks put in her skull during the first surgery to hold the bone in place. Thankfully, though, it was caught early.
Now, in recovery, she hopes that her ordeal can be a lesson to others, particularly women, to trust their instincts.
She said: “We are frequently told by doctors that there is nothing to worry about [when] you kind of know that there’s something to worry about. There’s nothing to be afraid of in having information. It’s only empowering.”
Madison Burgess