Photo: Dia Dipasupil/WireImage
Busy Philipps shared in a new interview with People that she underwent surgery for a rare brain tumor earlier this year. “I’m grateful that I’m alive,” Philipps told the outlet, calling this period “the weirdest six months of my life.”
Last year, Philipps said, she started looking into getting a Prenuvo scan, a full-body MRI that claims to check for over 500 different conditions. She’d read about the scan on Instagram, but when she brought up the prospect to her primary doctor, he apparently told her there was “no need” for it, considering Philipps was relatively young and healthy, and her bloodwork didn’t show anything concerning. “I didn’t know why I wanted to get this scan except for the fact that I just did,” she said.
Ignoring her physician’s advice, Philipps went ahead and scheduled the scan for January, though a blizzard later forced her to push the appointment to February. The day before the scan, her close friend and former Dawson’s Creek co-star James Van Der Beek died from colon cancer; the following day, she was due to meet with producers Robert and Michelle King, who were considering her for a role in their upcoming CBS show, Cupertino. Unsure of whether to cancel, she called her ex-husband and close friend, filmmaker Marc Silverstein. “He’s like, ‘Maybe it’s the best thing you could do for your friend this morning,’” Philipps recalled of their chat. “‘Go get that scan.’”
Days after she went through with the scan, Philipps said, she got a call from her doctor, explaining that they’d found a lesion on her brain. They’d already ruled out glioblastoma, an aggressive cancerous tumor with no cure, but urged her to schedule a follow-up MRI as soon as possible. Upon reviewing the second scan, her neurologist told her, “‘This is a real tumor, and it’s inside your brain, and, Busy, it’s got to come out,’” Philipps remembered. “I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe.” The same day, she learned she’d been cast in Cupertino and was set to begin filming that spring.
Philipps scheduled her surgery to remove the tumor in March, weeks before production on Cupertino was slated to begin. While she initially kept the show’s producers out of the loop, Philipps recalled the “agony” of having to fill in her daughters, 18-year-old Birdie and 13-year-old Cricket.
The procedure apparently lasted around five hours, and surgeons removed and biopsied a 2.6-centimeter mass that turned out to be a grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a slow-growing brain tumor that’s found in about 1,000 to 1,300 people per year in the U.S. Per the Cleveland Clinic, such tumors develop from oligodendrocytes, the support cells of the nervous system, and are mostly treatable, though they are known to reappear over time.
With 40 surgical staples in her head and very little pain, Philipps bounced back quickly and started work on Cupertino — that is, until she went to get Botox in April and her dermatologist noticed her incision site from the initial surgery was swollen. She wound up back in the hospital to get surgery for a staphylococcus infection. “The second surgery really threw me,” Philipps said. “I just felt like I was back to square one, and I was really, really upset.”
While she’ll continue to get regular scans, Philipps says she doesn’t need chemotherapy or radiation and has been told by her doctor that there’s “a great chance that this may not recur.” To this, Philipps asks: “What am I? The luckiest girl in the world?”
Philipps is grateful the whole ordeal wasn’t worse and that the mass was discovered as early as it was. If anything, she hopes women take her experience as a lesson to listen to their instincts. “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,” she said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in having information. It’s only empowering.”
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