Shannen Doherty Opens Up About Cancer to Chelsea Handler

Shannen Doherty was a guest on Chelsea Handler’s Netflix show this week, where she opened up about her battle with cancer. Chelsea lost her own mother to cancer, and was moved to tears listening to Shannen get personal about her experience.

“I think what’s beautiful and hard and interesting about cancer is that it tears you down and builds you, and tears you down and builds you. And it remakes you so many different times. So, the person I thought I was supposed to be or was going to be, or who I thought I was six months ago, is now somebody completely different.”

Shannen first went public about the disease in 2015, when she filed a lawsuit against her former employer for allegedly not paying her insurance premiums, and therefore causing her insurance to lapse.

She settled that suit a year later, at which point she shared that she had undergone a single mastectomy after the cancer had spread.

Shannen added that overall she was “humbled by cancer.”

“It was hard in the sense of rethinking sort of who you are and how you come to terms with who you are now and accepting it. And looking at your husband and thinking like, ‘Dude, I’m so sorry.'”