‘Boy Meets World’s’ Danielle Fishel Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis – National
Danielle Fishelrose to fame in the 90s for her role in a coming-of-age sitcom A boy meets the worldhas revealed she has breast cancer and is urging everyone to make regular appointments for cancer screenings.
Fishel, 43, shared the diagnosis on the The Pod Meets the World podcast, hosted alongside her former co-stars Rider Strong and Will Friedle. Fishel played Topanga Lawerence on the long-running ABC series.
“I’d like to share something with our listeners,” Fishel said at the start of Monday’s podcast. “I was recently diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, a form of breast cancer.”
“It’s very, very, very early. Technically, it’s stage zero,” Fishel said, adding that his specific diagnosis was “high-grade DCIS with microinvasion.”
DCIS is sometimes called “pre-cancer” or “stage zero” breast cancer because the cancer cells are only in the milk ducts of the breast and have not spread to the surrounding breast tissue or beyond, according to the University Health Network in Toronto.
The milk ducts cover a large area of the breast, so treatment of DCIS sometimes involves treating the entire breast.
“I’m fine, I’m going to have surgery to remove it,” Fishel reassured, adding that she will also undergo “follow-up treatment.”
Surgery is the main treatment for DCIS. Many people also have radiation therapy after surgery to reduce the risk of the cancer coming back, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
“Pod Meets World” hosts Will Friedle, Danielle Fishel and Rider Strong attend the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on September 22, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Greg Doherty/Getty Images
THE A boy meets the world The star revealed that the “only reason” doctors were able to diagnose her so early was because “the day I got my text telling me my annual mammogram was scheduled, I made the appointment.”
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There were many reasons for delaying the appointment, Fishel noted, including work and family commitments, but she recognized the importance of regular checkups and acted quickly.
“I want to share this because I hope it encourages everyone to take the plunge” and get screened for cancer, Fishel said.
There are still many “big decisions to make,” but Fishel has already made one big decision: to speak publicly about her diagnosis.
“For some reason, I always thought that if I was diagnosed with cancer, I would suffer in silence,” she said. “I would just tell my little group and get over it. And when I was done with it, I would tell people.”
But after sharing her diagnosis with close friends and family, she realized that “the more people I talked to, the more they had their own experiences, either being diagnosed with cancer themselves or a family member.”
There is so much more to be learned by sharing experiences, she discovered, especially at “the very beginning of a story or in the very confusing middle of a story.”
Fishel has “high-grade” DCIS, which means there is a higher risk that her cancer will become invasive and spread to other areas of the breast. The “grade” of a cancer describes how the cancer cells look and how quickly they grow compared to normal cells, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
Fishel’s doctor also noticed a “microinvasion” of cancer cells, meaning his cancer had spread no more than one millimeter in adjacent tissues.
DCIS is considered the most common form of noninvasive breast cancer. If the cancer cells spread to other parts of the breast, the patient may be diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma, the most common form of invasive breast cancer.
While it is certainly positive that Fishel’s cancer was caught early, early diagnosis does not necessarily mean better health outcomes for patients. 30 percent of women People diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer will develop metastatic breast cancer, in which the cancer spreads beyond the breast to other parts of the body.
According to the Government of Canada, one in eight women will develop breast cancer at some point in their lives.
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