Busy Philipps diagnosed with rare brain tumor after undergoing body scan her doctor told her she didn't 'need'

Busy Philipps is sharing how she was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor.

During a recent interview with People magazine , the 47-year-old "Cougar Town" actress shared the terrifying moment her doctor told her she had a brain tumor, the day after her "Dawson's Creek" co-star, James Van Der Beek, died following a battle with colorectal cancer.

"Dr.

Devinsky says to me, 'I'm just going to say this to you the way I would want someone to say it to me,'" she recalled.

"And that was when the wind like sort of knocked out of me and I had to sit down.

He was like, 'I need you to breathe.

I can hear that you're not breathing.' And I was like, 'Just tell me what's happening.' And he's like, 'This isn't any of those other things that they said it could be.

This is a real tumor and it's inside your brain and Busy, it's got to come out.

We got to take it out.'" She was then connected with Dr.

John Golfinos of NYU Langone and scheduled the five-hour surgery for March 2, during which surgeons removed a 2.6-centimeter mass from her brain. 'BACHELORETTE' STAR REVEALS BRAIN TUMOR DIAGNOSIS AFTER ROUTINE HEALTH SCAN The mass was then biopsied and revealed to be a grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a rare tumor that Dr.

Alexandra Miller, Philipps’s neuro-oncologist at NYU Langone told People, affects 1,100 to 1,300 people a year in the U.S.

She added that "it is considered malignant, but it has the best prognosis of all of the malignant gliomas." "It’s sort of defined as a cancerous tumor based on the ability of the tumor to regrow over time, rather than it looking very malignant under the microscope," Miller said.

The diagnosis came after Philipps told her cousin’s husband, a doctor in Los Angeles, that she was interested in getting a Prenuvo scan but that her primary care doctor had told her in 2025, "You're super healthy.

We've done all this other blood work.