In a heartfelt essay for The New Yorker titled “My Season of Ativan,” actress Amanda Peet revealed her breast cancer diagnosis, which came as both of her parents were undergoing hospice care on opposite coasts.
The Something’s Gotta Give star had been seeing a breast surgeon biannually for checkups, and prior to Labor Day last year, went in for what she thought would be a routine scan.
“Dr. K. usually chatted me up while she examined me, but this time she went silent,” Peet wrote. “She told me 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. That’s when I knew.”
After a preliminary report unveiled a small tumor, Peet was told she would need an MRI and further testing would unveil her receptor status, “which indicates how tough your strain of cancer is. ‘It’s like dogs,’ she explained. ‘You have poodles on one end and, on the other, pit bulls.’”
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Peet described anxiously awaiting her test results alongside her husband, Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff. “I sucked on little chips of Ativan all day, but my blood pressure was so jacked they didn’t even register. Then, at 4:42 P.M., Dr. K. texted: ‘All poodle features!’” The Chair co-executive producer/writer was told she was hormone-receptor-positive and ‘HER2-negative,’” both of which are more favorable for treatment.
“You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy,” Peet recalled. “I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer. But after about ten minutes I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror … It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”
While the subsequent MRI didn’t indicate lymph node spread, a radiologist discovered a second mass in the same breast, Peet said. As such, her planned lumpectomy was delayed and an MRI-guided biopsy was ordered.
Peet described the “excruciating” biopsy procedure, which involved using a latticed contraption to locate target sites for a needle injection on her breast. “Tom and my doctor called coordinates back and forth, as if playing a perverse game of Battleship, to confirm the quadrant of interest. Tom had to insure that my breast was pulled completely taut. If the flesh has any give (imagine a slightly deflated balloon), the hollow needle just rebounds. As I left, the doctor told me it was 50-50 whether or not there was more cancer.”
The mass turned out to be benign, which meant treatment necessitated a lumpectomy and radiation rather than a double mastectomy or chemotherapy. In her piece, the Your Friends & Neighbors star also noted her breast cancer is Stage I.
“Radiation wasn’t bad compared with Tom’s waffle iron—until the last stretch, when my nipple became charred and blistered, like an over-roasted marshmallow,” she wrote.
Toward the end of her essay, Peet also said she received a clear scan at the beginning of the year. Two weeks following that and after her father’s death the year prior, she began making funeral arrangements for her mother and recalled being present with her in her final days.
“I wasn’t sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting, disembodied shapes. I said ‘howdy doodle’—that’s how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything,” she concluded.
