“Anne with an E” actress Miranda McKeon is opening up about being diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer.
The 19-year-old, who has been speaking candidly about her cancer journey on Instagram, told People how she had been spending the weekend at a beach house with friends after a year of pandemic college classes when she felt a lump.
“I had the thought that, Wow, this is the moment. I immediately went to the worst-case scenario,” she shared. “This is the moment where everything changes and there’s no going back. But after going down a little Google rabbit hole, my mind was at ease because I didn’t think anything could be wrong because of my age.”
There’s a one-in-a-million chance of getting breast cancer as a 19-year-old, and McKeon was that one.
She explained how she was told her biopsy had come back positive on June 14 and from then on her life had been filled with ultrasounds, mammograms, consultations with surgeons, and oncologists.
McKeon’s cancer is considered stage 3 because it has spread to her lymph nodes, but she’s been advised that because of her age and overall health, this all indicates a strong outcome.
She told the mag, “My doctor was like, ‘Your stage doesn’t define you. And your cancer is your cancer.’ Which I appreciate because when you hear someone’s stage, your mind goes straight to one place or another and I don’t think that’s necessarily representative of what I’m going through.
“Although I don’t have the easiest-case scenario, like I wish it hadn’t spread to my lymph nodes or that it was a little less complicated, I never had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, am I going to die from this?’ That was never really a thought. I think this entire time it’s been more of like, ‘Okay, we’re going to treat this and solve it.'”
RELATED: Girls Aloud Singer Sarah Harding Details Breast Cancer Battle
McKeon is set to undergo four months of chemotherapy, with infusions every other week, followed by radiation and possibly surgery.
She also had to talk to doctors about freezing her eggs.
“That was gutting,” her mom Jill explained. “I said to the doctor, ‘We’ll talk about that later, this is already enough information.’ She was like, ‘Actually, we’re talking about this because we have to.'”
McKeon had her first chemotherapy infusion on July 7 and is “managing as best as I can.”
“I’m making it my job to find the beauty in all of this,” she insisted. “I wouldn’t have chosen this, I didn’t choose this, I don’t think anyone would choose this. But I’m making it my job to try and pull something out of this.”
The star said it was “cathartic” sharing her story with her nearly one million Instagram followers and through her blog.
“My blog is the one thing that is super-tangible that has come out of this where I’m like, ‘Damn, this is awesome.’ I’m hoping that by documenting a good majority of this, that someone else will be able to read it down the line when they need it and they can find comfort and healing through it in the way that I do writing it.
“I’m writing these pieces and it kind of just comes out of me,” she went on. “I feel more alone when I keep a piece to myself, so I’ve found so much strength through sharing it with this community.”
McKeon added, “I feel like, as humans, we look at other people in other situations and think, Wow, how are they doing that? Or Wow, I could never do that. And I probably would have thought the same thing about myself, but here I am and I’m now living in this story and I think we can all handle a lot more than we think we can.”
