A minor head injury helped Shannen Doherty’s doctors discover that her stage 4 breast cancer had spread to her brain the "Charmed" actor revealed on her podcast, “Let’s Be Clear.”
“The funny story behind this is that I kind of bumped my head after a Christmas party,” she said during the Jan. 1, 2024 episode featuring her oncologist, Dr. Lawrence Piro. “I called you and was like, ‘Hey, you know over the holidays I kind of hit my head pretty badly and I know that it was bleeding.’”
Doherty hoped that she was “fine” because she “didn’t die in her sleep,” she joked. But Piro wasn’t so sure and quickly ordered a CT scan of her head.
“We found, you know, (metastases) and I guess we can call (it) a tumor,” she says.
Piro shared that he originally ordered the CT scan because he worried Doherty had a brain injury from hitting her head.
“My bigger concern (was) … a subdural hematoma. That is a chronic slow oozing of blood that can present with symptoms coming a week or 10 days after the initial trauma,” he said during the podcast. “Some very famous people have died with that sort of thing. … That’s what I was concerned about more so than a tumor.”
The tumor’s discovery was fortunate because Piro noted that Doherty didn’t have symptoms that indicated cancer in the brain.
“You weren’t exhibiting any signs of trouble. You weren’t paralyzed. You weren’t having seizures,” Piro recalled. “I’m not even sure, given the relatively small size of those things, whether they were definitely causing some symptoms or not.”
The CT scan revealed some metastases of cancer in the brain, and Piro scheduled surgery, which Doherty underwent in January 2023, TODAY.com previously reported.
“I was at Cedar Sinai getting my head cut open and a tumor (was found),” she said in the podcast episode. “We got almost all of (it), and the rest we handled with brain radiation.”
Several months after her January 2023 brain surgery, the “90210” actor shared on Instagram a video filmed just before her surgery.
“Scared of all the possible bad outcomes, worried about leaving my mom and how that would impact her,” she reflected in an Instagram post from June 2023. “Worried that I would come out of surgery not me anymore. This is what cancer looks like.”
Doherty was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, went into remission in 2017 and then announced the cancer had returned as stage 4 three years later. In November 2023, she revealed the cancer had spread to her bones, TODAY.com previously reported.
Also in the podcast, Doherty candidly addressed what it’s like living with stage 4 breast cancer, considered by many to be the only terminal form of the disease. About one-third of women diagnosed with it live five or more years after diagnosis, according to breast cancer organization Susan G. Komen.
“Yes, there are people who only survive five years,” Doherty said. “I always talk about the fact that (I) just need to squeeze out another three to five years and then there’s going to be T cell therapy, or there’s going to be this or there’s going to be that. Whatever it is, there’s going to be a lot more options that will give (me) another five years.”