The Office star Jenna Fischer has announced she is cancer free after being diagnosed with with breast cancer last December. “Luckily my cancer was caught early and it hadn’t spread to my lymph nodes or throughout the rest of my body,” the actress wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday, where she urged followers to schedule their routine mammograms and ask doctors to calculate their Breast Cancer Risk Assessment scores for additional screenings. “I am now feeling great.”
In her post, Fischer said the cancer was discovered after a routine mammogram last fall. But because she has dense breast tissue — nearly half of American women over 40 are estimated to have dense breasts — her results were inconclusive. When she got a breast ultrasound, doctors found a growth in her left breast. They gave her a biopsy and diagnosed her with stage-1 triple-positive breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease that is characterized by elevated levels of estrogen and progesterone receptors, as well as HER2, a human-growth-factor protein that is found in regular breast tissue but can cause breast cells to multiply too quickly when there’s too much of it, sometimes leading to tumors. Fischer said she had a lumpectomy in January to remove the tumor, followed by chemotherapy and radiation to make sure the cancer didn’t return. The actress, who co-hosts the podcast Office Ladies with friend and former Office co-star Angela Kinsey, added that she hid her hair loss under wigs and hats to keep her diagnosis private.
Fischer told followers her tumor was too small to feel during a physical exam and credited increased social-media awareness around the importance of annual mammograms with her decision to get screened. “If I had waited six months longer, things could have been much worse,” she wrote. “Take it from Pam and her Pam-Pams. Michael was right. Get ’em checked, ladies.”
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