In a new emotional post, 51-year-old actress Shannen Doherty sits on the floor with her face against her dog Bowie. The post shows how close she has become to her dog as she continues to fight stage four breast cancer.
“It’s amazing how much dogs can help. “Heart-wrenching sh*t gets easier to deal with,” Doherty says in a touching Instagram post. Doherty was first told she had breast cancer in 2015 when she found a lump in her breast that turned out to be cancerous.
She is best known for playing Brenda Walsh on the TV show Beverly Hills, 90210. She tried hormone therapy to treat her cancer, but it didn’t work, and the disease had already spread to her lymph nodes. The actress is active on Instagram.
She tells her 1.9 million followers about the ups and downs of her fight against cancer. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen photos of Ms. Bowie, but it is one of the most heartfelt and moving posts about the dog in recent months. She cares a lot about animals and has spoken out against animal cruelty in the past.
Doherty Was Told He Had Cancer
For her breast cancer, Doherty had a single mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation. She said in February 2020 that her cancer had come back and spread to other parts of her body. This time, it had been gone for a while.
Surgery, like the single mastectomy that Doherty had, is a common way for people with breast cancer to get better. Dr. Ann Partridge, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the founder and director of the Program for Young Women with Breast Cancer, talks about how to get ready for surgery.
Dr. Partridge said, “When a woman comes to me with breast cancer, I talk to her about her standard treatment options, which usually include cutting out cancer, which is either a lumpectomy if you can get it all with just a little scooping around of the area that’s abnormal or a mastectomy for some women, which means taking the whole breast because these lesions can sometimes be very large in the breast.”
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How to Understand Breast Cancer That Has Spread
Doherty has shown that just because you have advanced cancer, you don’t have to stop living. Metastatic breast cancer, also called “stage four” breast cancer, means that cancer has spread beyond the breasts to other parts of the body.
It usually spreads to the bones, liver, and lungs, but it can also spread to the brain or other organs. Metastatic breast cancer can seem like it doesn’t have a good outlook because there is no cure for it, but there are many ways to treat it.
Hormone therapy, chemotherapy, targeted drugs, immunotherapy, and a mix of different treatments are some of these. In a previous interview with SurvivorNet, Dr. Elizabeth Comen, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, talked about how she tries to deal with advanced breast cancer.
“The goal of treatment for people with advanced disease is to keep them as stable as possible, slow the growth of the tumor, and improve their quality of life,” Dr. Comen said.
The American Cancer Society says that at the beginning of 2019, there were more than 3.8 million U.S. women still alive who had had breast cancer in the past. Some of the women were cancer-free, while others still had signs of the disease.
They also said that more than 150,000 breast cancer survivors were living with metastatic disease, and that three-fourths of them were originally diagnosed with stage I-III. And because treatments and options are getting better all the time and can make symptoms much better, there are many reasons to be hopeful.
