Shannen Doherty says she is planning to lover ‘another 10 or 15 years’ as she is battling with stage 4 breast cancer.
She was diagnosed with the disease almost one and a half years ago after experiencing sharp pain in her back. She says she is still feeling strong and healthy despite her terminal disease.
Recently, she told ELLE magazine, “It’s like anybody with Stage 4 faces this sort of thing, where others want to put you out to pasture. I’m not ready for pasture. I’ve got a lot of life in me.”
The Beverly Hills, 90210 star added, “It was no longer, ‘I worked out, and I’m a little sore.’ It was like, ‘God, this hurts!’”
Her doctor has confirmed that her breast cancer had returned and spread to her spine. Doherty is undergoing hormonal therapy along with other drugs, but her cancer has metastasized, meaning it is more likely to spread to her lungs, brain, and liver.
Initially, Doherty said she wondered why this was happening to her.
She said, “I was like, ‘Okay, do I have good karma? Do I have bad karma? Why would I have bad karma?’ I started taking stock of my life and the things I’d done, and the things I hadn’t done. How I was with people.”
“At the end of that, what I came out with was, I have good karma,” the 49-year-old old actress continued. “It may not seem like it, but I’ve been a really good human being,” she said, in reference to the years of negative press about her attitude.”
Doherty said, “It helped that she had already moved past those tumultuous Beverly Hills, 90210 years after her first breast cancer diagnosis in 2015.”
“When I got cancer the first time, it was this really beautiful thing, because it finally stripped all of that away. Those walls were, like, eliminated. That sort of childhood resentment — 19 to me is childhood — was gone.”
Now, Doherty has been doing well at home in Malibu with her husband, Kurt Iswarienko. They have been taking extra precautions during the ongoing pandemic because she is at high risk of catching COVID-19. Doherty said, “There are things I need to say to my mom. I want my husband to know what he’s meant to me. But whenever it comes time for me to do it, it feels so final. It feels like you’re signing off, and I’m not signing off. I feel like I’m a very, very healthy human being. It’s hard to wrap up your affairs when you feel like you’re going to live another 10 or 15 years.”
