Let's Be Bold...with Amy Robach

interviewing the late great Shannon Doherty. It was twenty twenty. It was actually right before the pandemic, right before all hell broke loose in this country. In February of twenty twenty. Wow,

that was five years ago. I got to sit down and speak with Shannon, and she decided that month, that day to let the world know what she had been dealing with and what she had known for some time at that point, that her cancer, that her breast cancer had come back, that it was stage four metastatic breast cancer, and it was gutting. It's the news that no breast cancer patient survivor wants to hear. It's the thing that we all fear I, for those of you who don't know,

am also a breast cancer survivor. I had stage two breast cancer. It had traveled to my lympt notes and I was diagnosed through a work assignment on Good Morning America. So it was a full circle moment to be able to speak with Shannon there on Good Morning America. Seven years later. She and I were diagnosed within a couple of years of each other with early stage breast cancer. And so yes for her to have to come back and tell the world that her cancer had come back.

And for a lot of cancers, I can come back, and you can fight it and you can beat it. But those of us who have had breast cancer know that when you get the stage four metastatic diagnosis, that it is a terminal one right now. And there are drugs and there are ways to fight it, to prolong your life and to live longer and better, but ultimately, right now, if you get a stage four metastatic diagnosis,

you are dying. And so when Shannon sat down with me to break this news, it was heartbreaking and it was personal. I, like so many of you, grew up loving Shannon Doherty. I think we're we're about one or two years apart. I'm fifty two. I think she might have been two years older than me.

dark it's going to get. But I'm sharing this with the world because I want other women to not feel alone. I want to promote and be an advocate for better research. So that we can find a cure to this disease. And I'm going to put my name, and I'm going to put my face, and I'm going to put all of this pain out there to the world so that we can all collectively embrace each other and then work together to try and find a cure. Is so brave.

That is so brave. I remember when I first was diagnosed and decided to go public with my breast cancer diagnosis. My surgeon said to me the night before the surgery, are you sure you want to go public with this? Are you sure you want to tell the world about your diagnosis? And I said yes, but why are you asking me like this? And doctor Axelrod said, are you prepared to be pitied? I don't know that you are.

It's a big deal to have people look at you and look at you like they're almost attending your funeral, and that will happen to you, and sure enough it did. You know, you get the cancer nod and the cancer hugs, and the people look at you with pity. And it's a strange thing to experience if you haven't before. And it's one thing to have an early stage diagnosis like

she and I both did in the beginning. It's another thing altogether, when you're telling the world that you have an incurable disease and that you're dying, and that takes a whole other level of bravery that I just want to commend Shannon for doing. Because when you tell your story, when one person tells their story, it affects everyone around you.

All the women in your life tend to go and make those manbogram appointments or to make that doctor's appointment, to keep those appointments that they hadn't before, because they're suddenly realizing how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and that if we don't have our health, we don't

have anything. So every person listening to this podcast, no matter what it is you may be dealing with, whether it's loss or a disease or some sort of issue, when you share it with one person, it affects everyone around you because there is a collective learning and understanding and growing that comes from it. So when you're someone like Shannon Doherty and you take your tremendous and enormous platform and you tell the world what you're dealing with,

the impact of that is immense. And so I just I was sitting there talking with her and interviewing her. I was in awe of her because I have thought, and I think a lot of women who have early stage breast cancer have thought about what they would do and how they would handle a stage four metastatic diagnosis. Anyone who has had breast cancer lives with that threat, lives with that fear of it returning, of it recurring,

and of it being stage four metastatic. And we live our lives differently because of it, and we spend our time differently because of it. But there's a lot of fear and a lot of mental work that has to be done along with the physical when you're dealing with the breast cancer diagnosis, and specifically a stage four metastatic diagnosis.

I have had two dear friends, One has already passed and one is rounding just rounded her seventh year as a metastatic breast cancer patient, and that is frankly remarkable, and I am an awe of her each and every day. It's people like Shannon. It's people like my friend Morgan, my dear friend Olivia, who I lost, we all lost last November. They are the women who I think of every day when I have little things that happen where I am upset or I feel frustrated by I think

about those women and I say, I got this. This is a very small problem. This is just a situation that needs to be addressed. It's not actually a real problem. It just puts full perspective into your life. And I just want to share with all of you in this podcast what I learned from Shannon, from women like Shannon,

and from my own personal diagnosis. I don't know how many people know my story who are listening to this, but I was forty years old, and at the time, the recommendations by all the different agencies that tell women how often they should get tests and when they should get tests. Even the American Cancer Society that point had said women could wait until they were forty five.

I said, no, I just I'm an authentic person, and I just I told my producers at Good Morning America, I had no intention of getting a mammogram, and I was planning on waiting ten years before I had my first mammogram, and so I didn't want to go on national television and tell other women to get a mammogram. If I myself was not going to get one, that was just a non starter for me. And they asked me to speak to Robin Roberts, who is also a

breast cancer arriver. She doesn't even like the words survivor. She is a thriver. And they said, will you please talk to Robin for you make it an absolute no. I said sure. So I walked into Robin's dressing room and I said, hey, Robin, I'm not the gal. I'm not the one who should go into the Mamma Van next week. I have no connection to the disease. My mom is one of nine, my dad is one of six. At that time, I had all of my grandparents still alive,

all of my aunts, all of my cousins. No one, and I don't even know how many cousins I have at this point, but no one has breast cancer in my family. So I just felt like I had no personal connection to the disease, and I certainly didn't think that I needed a mammogram. And Robin said to me, She laughed and said, you're exactly the person who should walk into that Mamma Van because you think cancer can't

happen to you. And she said, I'm sure you're fine, but it's that mentality that causes women not to make those appointments and not to keep those appointments. And so let me just say this to you. Robin said, if you walk into that Mamma Van and you get that mammogram on live national television, and you show the world, you show the women watching that it's not that painful, that it's not that hard, you will save a life.

One woman will make her appointment who wouldn't have otherwise, and she will find her breast cancer and she will thank you for saving her life. That was a really, really compelling argument, and I did a one eight in that moment. I remember feeling emotion. It felt like a watershed moment, and I said to Robin, I said, we were in her dressing room. I said, I cannot believe I'm saying this. I'm going to do a one eighty here and I'll do it. I'll do it. I can't

beat that argument. I'll say yes. And so, because I was nudged by Robin and my producers to get into that Mamma Van and to get that mammogram, I found my breast cancer. And that was just the beginning. I got the diagnosis that they found a lump in my right breast, and it seemed like it was fairly small, and so my surgeon recommended that I have a lumpectomy. Something that Robin told me and something that Hotocopy told me too, women who I knew and loved who had

survived and thrived beyond their diagnosis. They both told me about the power of advocacy and that each patient has a right to navigate their own treatment. And that's a scary thing for a lot of women. And doctors are much smarter than me. I don't have a medical degree. My brother does, so I was lucky enough to be able to lean on him as well. But when I

was told that a lumpectomy was my best option. I dug in and looked further, and my brother, really, among all the people I talked to, convinced me to have a double mistectomy. And that is a scary surgery. It is it is an amputation. It is not something to take lightly, and it is life changing. And every day I am in the shower, I don't have feeling in

my breasts. Every day I take a shower, I know that I'm a breast cancer survivor because it just the best way I can describe it is if you've had novacane to get a cavity filled, how it feels weird, and you can that's how my breasts feel. That's how they will always feel. And that's a lot better than they felt in the months after the double mis aectamy. So my point being, I am not advocating double mistectomies here because they are a very serious surgery that require

very serious consideration. However, my surgeon really didn't think I should get a double mistectomy. She didn't think I needed one, and the night before the surgery, she also wouldn't that phone call. She also said to me, are you sure you don't want to get a lumpect to me, are you sure you don't want to change your mind? And I said, I'm sure. When I woke up from the surgery, there she was, my surgeon standing over me, and she said to me, Okay, you were right, but I was good.

And she told me that when they did the double mistectmy she took her finger and just felt the lining of my chest wall. And I had had, by the way, an MRI, a sonogram, and the mammogram, and all of those tests only showed one malignant mass. When she felt the lining of my chest wall, she found another mass. They tested it on the site and found out that it too was malignant. So she found a second malignant

tumor only because I had the double mistect me. And I just always want to tell that story because you never know. You have to trust really the research you've done. And at the end of the day, it was my gut. My gut just told me that I wanted to get a double mistect to me, and it proved to be the best choice of an the best course of action. When they did all of the testing on all of my breast tissue from both breasts. My left breast also was completely pre cancerous and so it too they believe

would have ultimately developed into breast cancer. So having the double the bilateral mistectomy was absolutely the right decision for me, and it was confirmed with the surgical results. So I always always want to tell that story. The other decision you have to make is what happens afterwards. I went, I actually went, I had to have chemo. You get an ANCO score. It tells you your chance of recurrence and the threat of having a comeback metastatic mind was

much higher than they wanted it to be. And just all the lab work that they did on my breast issue, my oncologist said, you don't have a choice. You have to have chemo. So I went through six months of chemo. And then when you're done with that and you have your reconstructive surgery, now you have drug therapy. And this is the point I want to talk about because Shannon and I had this discussion Shannon Dolherty and I when she came in and sat down with me. At that point,

I believe I was on year six of tomoxifin. So tomoxifin is a drug that is offered to women who have er positive breast cancer. So you're it's hormonally fueled, and so the tomoxif in. I'm not again a medical scientist, but the best way in Layman's term I can describe it, the way I understand that it works is it suppresses your estrogen. It suppresses those hormones that feed cancer cells. And I remember my on college is telling me you have to get chemo, but even more importantly, you have

to take tomoxivin. And it had just they had said five years was the gold standard, and they had just raised it to ten years. They want women to be on this drug for ten years. So I'm forty and now I'm going into forced menopause and all of the things that come with that, the hot flashes, the joint pain, the dry skin, the just there are so many negative

side effects that come from it. But at the time, you know, my daughters were I had two little girls who were seven and ten at the time when I was diagnosed, and my oncologist told me right away, you are out of the baby making business. And I had been trying to have another child actually the whole year before. So she said, thank god you didn't get pregnant, and that really shook me. And you know to be told you're out of the baby making business. I was lucky

enough to have already had two children. Shannon did not. She was not in that same situation. And so when she was then presented with these same options because we had similar hormonally fueled cancers, she opted not to have the demoxifin. She wanted to keep her options open. And that's a very fair personal decision that every woman has to make. But Shannon decided not to have tamoxifin. I

decided to have tomoxifin. No one will ever know if one decision led to the next outcome, but I know that that Shannon at the end regretted not taking the demoxofin, and I remember when she told me that she was not she decided not to take the tomoxfin I just thought a mop in my throat because my friend Olivia, who I just mentioned earlier in this the beginning of this podcast, who passed last November. She and I were diagnosed again like she had an ER positive cancer. She

was also staged two. It had traveled to her lymp notes. Like me, she also opted. She started on the tomoxopin. She's a professional dancer, she said her joints hurt too much, and so she stopped taking it, and when her cancer came back four years later, stage four metastatic, she said to me, God, I wish I had stayed on that tom oxivan. So it's just it's not fair. No one knows. Olivia and Shannon could have stayed on to moxifin and been on to moxifin and they still may have had

the same outcome. But it's just worth mentioning that. It's just I remember feeling, and I still feel to this day that when you are a breast cancer patient, suddenly all of these decisions are handed to you, and people can tell you what they think, and they can tell you what the best advice they believe is. But ultimately you go with your gut, you go with your heart,

and you make the choice. But that's a scary thing because no one really knows what one decision leads to, and you just have to make the best decision in the moment. I know that's what Shannon did. That was the best decision for her and her life in that moment and what she wanted, and it was the best decision for Olivia in her life. I do know that I have made a lot of changes over the years since I've been diagnosed with breast cancer, health choices. I

started running. I've always been a runner, but I OpEd my game. It took me a couple of years. I just don't want anyone to think somehow I got cancer and then became a superwoman. I was at that point I was writing a book, and I did write a book. If anyone would like to pick it up, it was my book is called Better, and it was about how

my life has gotten better through this diagnose. It doesn't mean it was easier, it doesn't mean it was less challenging, but I was able to make better decisions, and so many of my decisions, even my last decision to leave my last marriage, was absolutely influenced by my cancer diagnosis.

Because people who have not just had cancer and lived with cancer, but had any sort of life threatening situation happened to them, and it happens almost at some point to everyone, just depends on when it happens to you. But you realize that the most precious thing in life, and we all know this intellectually, but you realize it

on a cellular level that time. Time is the one thing that we don't get back that we're not guaranteed, and so how I spend my time and who I spend it with, and how I make my decisions, we're all now funneled through that lens of time is precious and it's not guaranteed. And you know it intimately when you have had cancer and you are constantly or at least feel like you're under the threat of it returning. I think about it all the time. I think about what I would do if it came back, who I

would tell, would I go public? And you know what, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know that I would go public until I had to. I don't know if I would want to be the face of that the way I was even with early stage press cancer. And so again I just give so much credit to Shannon for allowing us on that journey with her so that we could could be with her but also learn from her and hopefully keep champ fighting and being champions for her in the cause and the cure.

And that's where my my focus is right now, because I do try to balance my life in a much different way, you know what I do, and I encourage everyone to do this you don't have to have gone through anything too significant yet to choose this. I choose fun. I choose fun, I choose laughter. I wake up most mornings and literally say to myself, how am I going to have fun today? It doesn't have to be silly

or inane or something. It's just it's a choice about how you go through life and what your attitude is. And yes, I have bad days where I am not in the mood to have fun, but I do prioritize fun in a way that I hadn't before. I prioritize enjoyment of life. And that's why we're here. I believe that's why we're here to love each other, to love ourselves, and to learn and that can all happen with joy. And that is the biggest lesson I learned. And I

know that. I know that this is such a sad topic and a painful topic, and I think for that reason, a lot of people shy away from it. They shy away from talking about it, and sometimes from even making appointments. I have heard from women who say they have not made their mammogram appointments, that they have not even made doctor appointments because they don't want to know that ignorance is bliss, that it's better to not have the test and not be worried about it, and that to me,

I understand, I was that person. I would have waited until I was fifty to have that mammogram. And I honestly do not believe that I would be here talking to you today if I hadn't been pushed literally into that, Mamma Van. And so for anyone who was listening, and if you're a man listening, tell this to the women you love in your life. Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to cancer. The earlier we find cancer, the better chance we have of surviving it, period, end of story.

And so my daughters, the recommendation is for them to have a mammogram ten years before their mom was first diagnosed. So at thirty, my daughters are going to have their baseline mammogram. And I had a slow growing cancer. So I absolutely got breast cancer in my late thirties. And that's a very very very scary thing and that should not be happening. And so I change my diet, I changed my lifestyle, I change my attitude. Those are the three things that I had control of. I don't have

control of anything else. So yes, I run marathons. I've left my game. Like I said, I work out at least five days a week, I watch what I eat. I've lessened my drinking, and I've lessened to my stress level. I really think that's an important part of this, to make sure that we take care of our mental health along with our physical health, because I do think those two are connected, and especially when it comes to cancer, we can all do better at just relaxing and creating

a real perspective in our lives. Is this going to matter in five minutes, This is going to matter in five years? And really put that to the test when we try to recognize how we're reacting to life into problems. And I do believe that every woman should get a mammogram by the age of forty. And I do believe that you should be able to have access to not just a mammogram because you have dense breast tissue issues.

For a lot of women, so we need ultrasound opportunities, three D mammograms, and all of the tests available to us. I just I'm imploring you who are listening to make your appointments and take advantage of these life saving tests that we have now. Mammograms are not perfect, and there is no perfect test, but they're the best test we have, and they certainly have saved countless lives. This is the truth. Wherever in the world mimmography has been introduced, the death

rates from cancer have dropped. Period. Now it's again, it's not there are can't There are women who have had cancers that have gone undiagnosed or undetected by mammograms. So again, they are not fool proof, but they are the best test we have, and that is what I'm asking each and every woman listening here today to take advantage of

because it's saved my life and I have been. When I first started speaking publicly about my breast cancer, I was taken to task by some people, especially those in the metastatic community, who want there to be less of a focused on early detection and more of a focus on raising funds to find a cure. And I fully, fully, fully agree that both need to happen, and both need

to get equal time and equal press. That isn't the case right now, But they have said to me, hey, you know, you can't say that a mamma save your life and technically they're right. I can't prove that a mammogram saved my life, but I can tell you that it gave me the best chance at surviving this insidious disease. It gave me the best chance of dying from something else other than breast cancer, and that cannot be refuted.

So I just make that argument to anyone, and I'm acknowledging that more needs to be done in terms of research so that we have more tests and more ways of detecting cancer. I am a huge advocate of that. And again I am a huge advocate of raising fund Someone once told me there is a cure for cancer. It's called cash, and so I implore everyone if you have a charity that you love for me, it's BCRF

Breast Cancer Research Foundation. They do more. They are actually a huge reason why demoxithin even exists, that drug that I think is of course life saving or at least I credit in part to saving my life or keeping me in the health that I'm in today. That all came from research, and any organization that funds research that gets these scientists working together to collaborate to find a cure,

I am there for it. So we can all do our part mentally, physically, and maybe even financially, but let's think about what we can do to honor Shannon's memory, to honor the women who are fighting right now, and the women who don't even know they're about to receive that diagnosis. And it happens every day in this country, and more often than it should. But I just I want everyone. I want to end on a positive note because there are beautiful things that come out of dealing

with something so scary and so awful. And the number one most important thing I learned is how to live that you can be living but not really And Shannon, Shannon, I'm going to leave you with my favorite thing. And I talk about this a lot. Shannon showed me the most amazing, the most amazing cartoon that she said she looked at almost every day, And I'll leave you with this. It is Snoopy and it is Charlie Brown. And Charlie Brown says, Yolo, Snoopy, and Snoopy says, you got it wrong.

We don't only live once, we only die once. We live every day and that is what I think of every day. And I think of Shannon often because she's the one who showed me that beautiful way to turn Yolo around. Yeah, we only die once. We live every day.

I want to thank everyone for listening to this episode of Let's Be Clear, and I want to thank the producers for giving me the opportunity to share my experience with Shannon, my experience with breast cancer, and I hope that my story connected with some of you in a meaningful way. And I also just want to let everyone know, if you didn't know, please check out Amy and TJ. We have a couple podcasts we drop every week, but

then every morning we have our Morning Run. So if you want to have a quick twenty minute catch up on the headlines before you head into work, or as you're heading into work, or as you're dropping off the kids, consider checking out Morning Run on the Amy and TJ podcast. But until then, I hope you all have a wonderful day and thank you for letting me share my story.