The Office star Jenna Fischer recently sat down with Hoda Kotb for a moving discussion about her breast cancer journey, marking the first time the comedy actress has opened up about her diagnosis since announcing the news on social media earlier this month.
In the interview, which aired on The Today Show this morning, Fischer revealed she learned about her diagnosis after her routine mammogram appointment.
“Three weeks later, they said, ‘Oh, your mammogram was fine. There were a few spots that were difficult to see. You have very dense tissue. We would recommend that you do another mammogram and maybe follow up with a breast ultrasound,’” she told Kotb, adding, “It was a total eyeroll. This is why I would put this off because now I have to go back again.”
Fischer explained that she only started becoming “nervous” when she went in for a biopsy per their recommendation. She later received the results via her patient portal while going on a hike by herself, discovering she had Stage 1 triple positive breast cancer.
“I checked the portal on the hike, and that’s when I saw words like ‘invasive,’ ‘ductal,’ ‘carcinoma,’ ‘malignant,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Those words sound like cancer words.’”
Despite the inconvenience these annual appointments sometimes pose, Fischer maintains that her outcome could have been very different if she had kept putting off her mammogram.
“My tumor was still very small, too small to feel,” she said, per Today.com. “That’s the thing. A self-exam would not have (caught the cancer). It really was that routine mammogram that started all of this. And I’m so grateful that I went to that appointment.”
Fischer’s conversation with Kotb later took an emotional turn as she reflected on how the diagnosis began affecting her day-to-day life and her family.
“My husband, Lee, was absolutely incredible. A typical morning for us would be both of us getting up in the morning and making school lunches and doing school drop-offs. But under the circumstances, the most I could do was get downstairs and sit at the table with a cup of coffee, and he did all the rest,” she said through tears. Kotb, who is a breast cancer survivor as well, also had tears in her eyes throughout their conversation.
Fischer also revealed that Christina Applegate was one of the first people she reached out to after getting the news.
“I called her, and she answered the phone, and she said, ‘Which one is it?’ And I said, ‘It’s breast cancer.’ And she said, ‘I effing knew it,’” Fischer recalled. “She’s salty. Salty language, that one. I love her for it.”
“So many people took care of me, and my family, and my children, and I am so grateful for it — in so many small ways,” she later said in the interview. “And the thing is, is that everybody had the right way or the perfect way to do it.”
Fischer only recently announced her diagnosis to commemorate National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Since being diagnosed in December 2023, she has undergone surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, and is still receiving targeted therapy.
She urged viewers to attend their appointments and any extra screenings recommended by their physicians.
“If I had waited six more months, it could have been much worse. It could have spread. It was a very aggressive form of cancer,” Fischer said. “I’m really lucky that my cancer had not spread into my lymph nodes. It hadn’t spread anywhere else in my body.”