Shannen Doherty, who has stage 4 breast cancer, isn’t letting the disease control her life.
The actress, who plays a woman battling cancer in the upcoming Lifetime movie List of a Lifetime, told reporters this week she feels a responsibility to “let people know that people with stage 4 [cancer] are very much alive and very active,” according to People.
“My husband [photographer Kurt Iswarienko] says that you would never know that I have cancer,” Doherty said. “I never really complain. I don’t really talk about it. It’s part of life at this point.”
Doherty, 50, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, and after entering remission, she revealed last year that the disease had spread and returned as stage 4.
In an interview with Good Morning America, the Beverly Hills 90210 alumna said the diagnosis was “a bitter pill to swallow in a lot of ways.”
“I definitely have days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me?’ Who else? Who else besides me deserves this? None of us do,” Doherty said last year. “But I would say that my first reaction is always concern about how — how am I going to tell my mom, my husband.”
At the time, Doherty said that she hadn’t told many people about her condition, as she didn’t want to be treated differently or be forced to focus on cancer. In her latest interview, she added that unlike her character in the Lifetime movie, she hasn’t created a “bucket list,” either.
“There’s no bucket list because I’m going to be the longest-living person with cancer,” she said. “If I had to say one, it would just be living. That’s the only thing on my list at this point.”
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