Dawson's Creek star Busy Philipps has announced that she was diagnosed with a rare malignant brain tumor. Philipps says that doctors diagnosed her with the cancer a day after her co-star James Van Der Beek died from cancer.
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Speaking with People, Philipps says that she is "the luckiest girl in the world" and "grateful to be alive." Doctors diagnosed the Dawson's Creek star with a slow-growing grade 2 oligodendroglioma. They discovered it just a day after Van Der Beek died during a full-body MRI. Her cousin and ex-husband suggested she follow through with getting the test.
She also recalled, "[I wrote], 'OMG I have a brain tumor.' And he wrote back, 'Busy, what? What are you saying? What are you talking about?' I was like, 'It looks fine. It's probably benign. I don't know.'"
Another MRI confirmed "this is a real tumor, and it's inside your brain. And Busy, it's got to come out." Her kids were scared by the news.
'Dawson's Creek' Star Speaks Out
Philipps remembered, "I just kept saying to her, 'Birdie, you're just not in the movie where your mom dies your senior year of high school. That's just not the movie that you're in. I promise you.' [Cricket's] reaction ... was like, 'OK. You're going to be fine?' And I was like, 'I'm totally going to be fine.' And she's like, 'OK.'"
Doctors removed a 2.6-centimeter mass from the Dawson's Creek star's brain in March.
"It is considered malignant, but it has the best prognosis of all of the malignant gliomas," Philipps' neuro-oncologist, Dr. Alexandra Miller, said. "It's sort of defined as a cancerous tumor based on the ability of the tumor to regrow over time, rather than it looking very malignant under the microscope."
Unfortunately, the Dawson's Creek star contracted staphylococcus at the incision site and needed a second surgery.
"I've been saying this for the last few years," Philipps noted. "I wasn't consciously aware that anything was really wrong, but there was something that was misfiring. Like, I could not get a handle on it. We are frequently told by doctors that there is nothing to worry about [when] you kind of know that there's something to worry about. There's nothing to be afraid of in having information. It's only empowering."
