Shannen Doherty opens up about her cancer battle
Shannen Doherty made an appearance on Good Morning America on Monday, and was incredibly candid about her battle with stage four breast cancer. The actor had previously revealed that her cancer returned last year.
“I’m living life, I’m spending a lot of time with friends and family and working. I think work was always very fulfilling to me but in a way, it’s become even more fulfilling,” Doherty told the GMA hosts over Zoom.
“A lot of people who get diagnosed with stage four, they sort of get written off. It’s assumed that they cannot work or that they cannot work at their full capacity. That is not true and that is something that I would really like the people to stop assuming and give us a chance to prove them wrong.”
In an interview with GMA last year, Doherty revealed her cancer had returned after she had been in remission for five years. After being asked if she wanted to own her cancer story, Doherty said through tears, “Yeah, I’d rather people hear it from me.”
Doherty has been owning her story throughout her battle, sharing the highs and lows with her fans on Instagram, including her first day of radiation treatment and a photo of her hair loss after starting chemotherapy.
The actor is still on her first treatment schedule, also known as a protocol. She told GMA, “You want to last on your protocols as long as possible so that you don’t run out of protocols. You really have to dig deep to face cancer and in that, you find all the stuff that you had hidden away and it’s beautiful things that you find. You find the vulnerability, you find your trust in people again, you find forgiveness.”
She added that she doesn’t believe in bucket lists, and instead is “going to keep fighting to stay alive”. “I’d like to say that those are goals, because a bucket list almost feels like those things that you check off before you die and I never want to operate like that,” she said.
Image: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Hallmark Channel