What To Know
- Busy Philipps was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor after Prenuvo scan earlier this year.
- She had surgery to remove the 2.6 centimeter mass.
- Another surgery followed after she developed a staph infection at the incision site.
Busy Philipps has been secretly dealing with health issues for the last several months and is now opening up about it for the first time. The actress revealed to People on August 26 that doctors found a tumor on her brain in February.
“I’m grateful that I’m alive,” she admitted. “[It’s been] the weirdest six months of my life.”
Philipps said she had surgery to remove the malignant tumor just weeks before she started filming Cupertino. The grade 2 oligodendroglioma tumor was discovered after Philipps underwent a Prenuvo scan, which checks for more than 500 conditions, per People.
The actress said she nearly canceled the informational scan, as it was scheduled amid a very hectic time in her life. Her Dawson’s Creek costar James Van der Beek died the day before her appointment, and she was preparing to visit Arizona to help out her sister, who was undergoing a medical procedure of her own. Her ex-husband, Mark Silverstein, pushed her to go through with the appointment.
When the scan revealed a lesion on Philipps’ brain, doctors ruled out glioblastoma, but she was urged to have an MRI for a closer look. Doctors performed her five-hour surgery on March 2, removing a 2.6 centimeter mass from Philipps’ brain.
The tumor “is considered malignant, but it has the best prognosis of all of the malignant gliomas,” Philipps’ doctor told People. “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.”
Philipps recovered quickly and got to work on Cupertino, but when she visited her dermatologist for a Botox appointment in April, the doctor was concerned about the incision site. She urged Philipps to send a photo to her surgeons, who admitted, “That doesn’t look good.”
It turned out that Philipps had contracted a staph infection, requiring another surgery to clear it. During this procedure, one of the titanium tacks inserted to hold the bone in her skull in place was removed. Again, Philipps recovered quickly.
Moving forward, she will continue to get scans, but her doctor is optimistic. “She really has a great chance that this may not recur,” she said.