A minor head injury helped Shannen Doherty’s doctors discover that her stage 4 breast cancer had spread to her brain the “Charmed” actor revealed on her podcast, “Let’s Be Clear.”
“The funny story behind this is that I kind of bumped my head after a Christmas party,” she said during the Jan. 1, 2024 episode featuring her oncologist, Dr. Lawrence Piro. “I called you and was like, ‘Hey, you know over the holidays I kind of hit my head pretty badly and I know that it was bleeding.’”
Doherty hoped that she was “fine” because she “didn’t die in her sleep,” she joked. But Piro wasn’t so sure and quickly ordered a CT scan of her head.
“We found, you know, (metastases) and I guess we can call (it) a tumor,” she says.
Piro shared that he originally ordered the CT scan because he worried Doherty had a brain injury from hitting her head.
“My bigger concern (was) … a subdural hematoma. That is a chronic slow oozing of blood that can present with symptoms coming a week or 10 days after the initial trauma,” he said during the podcast. “Some very famous people have died with that sort of thing. … That’s what I was concerned about more so than a tumor.”
The tumor’s discovery was fortunate because Piro noted that Doherty didn’t have symptoms that indicated cancer in the brain.
“You weren’t exhibiting any signs of trouble. You weren’t paralyzed. You weren’t having seizures,” Piro recalled. “I’m not even sure, given the relatively small size of those things, whether they were definitely causing some symptoms or not.”
The CT scan revealed some metastases of cancer in the brain, and Piro scheduled surgery, which Doherty underwent in January 2023, TODAY.com previously reported.
“I was at Cedar Sinai getting my head cut open and a tumor (was found),” she said in the podcast episode. “We got almost all of (it), and the rest we handled with brain radiation.”
Several months after her January 2023 brain surgery,…
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