Danielle Fishel, who shot to fame in the ’90s for her role in coming-of-age sitcom Boy Meets World, has revealed she has breast cancer and is urging everyone to book regular cancer screenings.
Fishel, 43, shared the diagnosis on the Pod Meets World podcast, hosted alongside her former co-stars Rider Strong and Will Friedle. Fishel played Topanga Lawerence on the long-running ABC show.
“I would like to share something with our listeners,” Fishel said at the start of Monday’s podcast. “I was recently diagnosed with DCIS, which stands for ductal carcinoma in situ, which is a form of breast cancer.”
“It is very, very, very early. It’s technically stage zero,” Fishel said, adding that her specific diagnosis was “high grade DCIS with micro invasion.”
DCIS is sometimes called “pre-cancer” or “stage zero” breast cancer because the cancer cells are only found in the milk ducts of the breast and haven’t spread into the surrounding breast tissue or beyond, according to the University Health Network in Toronto.
Milk ducts do cover a large area of the breast, however, so DCIS treatment sometimes involves treating the entire breast.
“I’m going to be fine, I’m having surgery to remove it,” Fishel reassured listeners, adding that she will also undergo “follow-up treatment.”
Surgery is the main treatment for DCIS. Many people also undergo radiation therapy after surgery to lower the risk that the cancer will return, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
The Boy Meets World star revealed that the “only reason” doctors were able to catch her diagnosis so early is because “the day I got my text message that my yearly mammogram had come up, I made the appointment.”
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There were many reasons to delay the appointment, Fishel noted, including work and family commitments, but she recognized the importance of regular screenings and acted quickly.
“I want to share this because I hope it will encourage anyone to get in there” and do a cancer screening, Fishel said.
There are still a lot of “big decisions ahead,” but one important choice that’s already behind Fishel is her decision to speak publicly about her diagnosis.
“For some reason I had always thought [if I were diagnosed with cancer] I would suffer in silence,” she said. “I would tell only my small group and then I would just suck it up. And then when I’m on the other side of it then 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 people had their own experiences, either themselves being diagnosed with cancer or a family member.”
There is so much more to learn by sharing one’s experiences, she found, especially at the “very beginning of a story or in the very messy middle of a story.”
Fishel has “high grade” DCIS, which means that there is a higher chance her cancer will become invasive, and spread into other areas of the breast. A cancer’s “grade” describes how the cancer cells look and how quickly they grow compared to normal cells, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
Fishel doctor’s also noticed a “micro invasion” of cancer cells, which means that her cancer has spread no more than one millimetre into adjacent tissue.
DCIS is considered the most common form of non-invasive breast cancer. If cancer cells do spread to other parts of the breast, a patient may be diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma — the most common form of invasive breast cancer.
While it’s certainly a positive that Fishel’s cancer was detected early, an early diagnosis doesn’t necessarily mean better health outcomes for patients. Nearly 30 per cent of women 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 are expected to develop breast cancer at some point in their lifetime.
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