Shannen Doherty spent her final weeks enduring the “hardest time” she had ever experienced with cancer.
The ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ actress lost her years-long battle with the disease on Saturday (13.07.24) and at the end of June told her A-list friend Katherine Heigl, 45, she was going through hell with the disease.
She told her fellow star on her ‘Let’s Be Clear’ podcast: “I got cancer in 2015, and it went to remission, I think, right at the end of 2017 or at the beginning of 2018, and then it came back in 2019 as stage 4 breast cancer, but then it spread to my bones. And from there, it spread to my brain.
“There’s so many protocols. Eventually – it’s stage 4 cancer – eventually those protocols are gonna stop working.
“And you just hope that you are on one long enough for them to actually come up with another protocol and another protocol... so it’s really hard.
“This is probably the hardest time for me that I’ve ever had with the cancer.
“I’ve always kinda felt very positive and, like, I can deal with it, and this is definitely like – I’m overly emotional.
“I wanna cry every single second at good or bad (things.)”
Shannen also said living with cancer had altered how she thinks about life, adding: “What’s really beautiful about it is, I think you become so incredibly sensitive that your eyes are, like, wide open to everything around you, to people, to how they react, to what you can possibly do that's better for the world, like, what your purpose here is.
“Because I think I struggled with that kind of my entire life, being a child actor and then growing up acting, and I just never felt like I was accepted.
“I always, you know, looked at the ‘Friends’ crew and was like, ‘Oh my god. I wanna hang out with Jen Aniston and Courteney Cox.’
“And, you know, ‘Why doesn’t anybody accept me, and why am I always called the bad girl?’
“For me, cancer was that moment where I was like, ‘Oh, hell no.’
“I don’t need to hang out with any of these people. I need to make sure I’m happy and living the best life that I can while I’m still alive.”
Tagged in Katherine Heigl Jennifer Aniston Shannen Doherty