‘The Office’s Jenna Fischer Shares Secret Breast Cancer Battle
Jenna Fischer, best known for her role as Pam Beesly Halpert on The Office, is getting candid about her health as the actress took to social media to reveal her secret months-long breast cancer battle.
Sharing the announcement in recognition of breast cancer awareness month (October), Fischer wrote on Instagram, “I never thought I’d be making an announcement like this but here we are. Last December, I was diagnosed with Stage 1 Triple Positive Breast Cancer. After completing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation I am now cancer free.”
Sharing a photo of her new hairdo, which she refers to as a “patchy pixie,” Fischer revealed she wanted a photo of her “looking happy and healthy to go along with this news,” thanking Josh Snyder, the husband of her Office costar Angela Kinsey, for capturing the image.
View this post on Instagram
She provided more details about her battle in a series of slides following the main image. In those slides, she revealed that her journey essentially began a year ago in October 2023 when she went in for her yearly mammogram. After an inconclusive result, she was sent for additional testing and was officially diagnosed on December 1, 2023.
“Triple positive breast cancer is an aggressive form of breast cancer but it is also highly responsive to treatment. In January, I had a lumpectomy to remove the tumor. Luckily my cancer was caught early and it hadn’t spread into my lymph nodes or throughout the rest of my body, however because of the aggressive nature of triple positive breast cancer it still required chemotherapy and radiation to be sure it didn’t return,” Fischer explained.
Ultimately, she began a 12-week run with chemotherapy in February 2024, and during her treatments lost her hair, and has been donning “great wigs and hats with hair” until now. “I’m making this announcement for a few reasons. One, I’m ready to ditch the wigs,” she went on. “Two, to implore you to get your annual mammograms. You can also ask your doctor to calculate your Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Score and get any additional screenings required. I’m serious, call your doctor right now. My tumor was so small it could not be felt on a physical exam. If I had waited six months longer, things could have been much worse.”
“It takes a village to fight cancer, and I have had an amazing village,” Fischer’s post continued. While crediting her family and friends, she also gave a special shoutout to Kinsey, whose help allowed her to continue working as she went through treatment. “Thankfully I’ve been able to keep working during treatments. This was all because I work with my best friend Angela Kinsey who protected me and advocated for me. For a long time, she was the only person in my workspace who knew. When I lost my hair, she wore hats to our work meetings so I wouldn’t be the only one.”
See Fischer’s full statement in the embedded Instagram post, above.
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