Shannen Doherty says she took a gamble on fighting her stage 4 breast cancer with a new infusion treatment—and so far, it’s proved to be a “miracle.”
Speaking on her Let’s Be Clear podcast Monday, the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star said she’d stuck with the unspecified treatment after others were initially unimpressed.
“After four treatments, we didn’t really see a difference and everybody wanted me to switch, and I just was like, ‘We’re gonna keep going with this and see.’ After the sixth, seventh treatment we really saw it breaking down the blood-brain barrier. Do I call that a miracle? Yeah. For me, that happens to be a miracle right now. That I sort of rolled the dice and said, ‘Let’s keep going,’” she said, referring to the drug’s ability to cross the blood-brain barrier in order to target the cancer.
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The 52-year-old actress also opened up about the importance of finding the positive in her ongoing health struggles.
“Hope is always there. I can die today, I can die in 20 years, I don’t know. I can die walking outside of my house and a tree falling on me or a bus hitting me or whatever. Or I can die of cancer,” she said. “But all I can do is live each day in as much of a positive manner with a lot of hope as I can and embrace it and be like, ‘Wow, I get to wake up again today, and what do I get to do?’ I think that positivity that you bring into your life helps you with your whole body.”
The Charmed star has been fighting her cancer since 2015, when she was first diagnosed. The cancer returned in 2019 after going into remission, and last year Doherty revealed that it had spread to her brain, forcing her to have a brain tumor surgically removed.
