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Dawson’s Creek\u00a0actress Busy Philipps has revealed that she secretly underwent surgery earlier this year after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.<\/p>\n
The 47-year-old shared the shock\u00a0news\u00a0with\u00a0PEOPLE Magazine\u00a0on Wednesday (26 August) and said she’s ‘grateful to be alive’ after ‘the weirdest six months of my\u00a0life’.<\/p>\n
Philipps was diagnosed with grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a rare slow-growing tumour, in February, after getting a full-body Prenuvo MRI scan.<\/p>\n
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Despite being told by her primary care doctor that there was ‘no need’ because she\u2019s young and\u00a0healthy, she followed her instincts and booked in the appointment.<\/p>\n
She told the outlet: “I didn\u2019t know why I wanted to get this scan except for the fact that I just did” and admitted she\u00a0had no obvious symptoms, but had seen the scans advertised on\u00a0social media.<\/p>\n
After the scan, the star recalled her doctor telling her: \u201c\u2018This is a real tumor, and it\u2019s inside your brain. And Busy, it\u2019s got to come out,” she added, “I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe.\u201d<\/p>\n
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In March, Philipps underwent a five-hour-long procedure, during which the 2.6cm mass in her brain was removed, biopsied and discovered to be an oligodendroglioma.<\/p>\n
As per\u00a0Cancer Research UK, oligodendrogliomas are a type of brain tumour that belongs to a group of brain tumours called gliomas.<\/p>\n
Common symptoms are seizures (fits), headaches, weakness and numbness in your arms and legs, and feeling or being sick.<\/p>\n
They are rare, and roughly three out of every 100 primary brain tumours (about 3%) diagnosed in England between 1995 and 2017 were oligodendrogliomas.<\/p>\n
Philipps’ news came just as she was due to start filming her CBS\u00a0TV show\u00a0Cupertino, and she had to tell her daughters Birdie, 18, and Cricket, 13, about her diagnosis.<\/p>\n
She recalled that Birdie was ‘kind of beside herself and really, really scared and overwhelmed with emotion’.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Cougar Town\u00a0actress said: “I just kept saying to her, \u2018Birdie, you\u2019re just not in the movie where your mom dies your senior year of high school. That\u2019s just not the movie that you\u2019re in. I promise you.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
The scan also came just a day after her\u00a0Dawson\u2019s Creek\u00a0co-star James Van Der Beek\u00a0tragically died of colon\u00a0cancer.<\/p>\n
After her surgery, Philipps started her ‘dream’ job in\u00a0Cupertino,\u00a0but faced a frightening setback when she went to get Botox from her dermatologist, who saw the incision site from the surgery and said it ‘didn’t look good’.<\/p>\n
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The star recalled: “She\u2019s like, \u2018That doesn\u2019t look right. I\u2019m not going to touch it\u2026.Can I take a picture of it and will you send it to your surgeons right now?\u2019…And I did and they immediately were like, \u2018That doesn\u2019t look good.'”<\/p>\n
As per PEOPLE, she saw a wound care specialist who put her on antibiotics before she ended up back in hospital having contracted staphylococcus in her incision.<\/p>\n
Philipps needed debridement surgery to clear it and remove one of the titanium tacks put in her skull during the first surgery to hold the bone in place. Thankfully, though, it was caught early.<\/p>\n
Now, in recovery, she hopes that her ordeal can be a lesson to others, particularly women, to trust their instincts.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cWe are frequently told by doctors that there is nothing to worry about [when] you kind of know that there\u2019s something to worry about. There\u2019s nothing to be afraid of in having information. It\u2019s only empowering.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dawson’s Creek\u00a0actress Busy Philipps has revealed that she secretly underwent surgery earlier this year after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. The 47-year-old shared … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17411,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17409\/revisions\/17411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heightshowtime.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}