Shannen Doherty’s Breast Cancer Has Spread, Her Dog The First to Detect It, Shares Inspirational Photos of Struggle

Shannen Doherty recently posted a bedridden photo of herself on Instagram, captioning it saying that chemo had been terrible for her. She has had three out of eight chemotherapy sessions as of yet, and she will go for radiation therapy once the chemotherapy is over.

The former Beverly Hills 90210 star has been publicly documenting her cancer ever since she decided to go public with it in August 2015, six months after she was diagnosed, in an attempt to come to terms with it and to reach out to other cancer victims.

She said that the worst part about cancer is coming face-to-face with the unknown. She said that there was a time when she believed that she would not be able to make it, that she lives considering only one day at a time. It is her husband who has been helping to get her over the worst bits.

Doherty married photographer Kurt Iswarienko more than four years ago. Shannen, who had been married two times before for very short periods of time, and had said that she had not made the best choices when it came to men, is very happy with him.

In fact, it is Iswarienko who has been an incredible support for her ever since the day she was diagnosed with cancer. While he was in Mexico on the day Doherty finally decided to chop off her trademark raven locks; he had constantly sent her encouraging messages.

For Doherty to do away with her hair was a very difficult experience. She had decided to go forward with chemo once she got to know that some of the cancer cells had reached her lymph nodes. After two rounds of chemo, when her matted hair started falling out in chunks, she finally decided to go ahead with it.

In late July, the 45-year-old star shared some videos and photos of herself in the process in Instagram to document her experience. While her husband was absent, her mother Rosa Elizabeth Doherty and two friends, one of them model Anne Marie Kortright, were there to see her through it.

Shannen says that she had tried trimming her hair down in stages, moving from a pixie to a Mohawk, which had been her favorite, before finally having to let go of everything. She said that she did not want someone to click photos of her in some grocery store and then create a sensation about it.

Shannen had undergone a single mastectomy in May, after which she had an emotional bra-fitting experience in a dressing-room. Back in February she had revealed in an interview that she was taking medication to shrink her tumor.

It was difficult for Doherty as she had wanted children with her present husband, and cancer medicines block the female hormone estrogen. She had said the decision of having a lumpectomy, or a mastectomy was something that she left to her doctors.

In that interview, she had said that she loved her breasts as any woman would do, but at the end of the day, she would rather lose them if it meant she could grow old with her husband by her side.

In the recent interview with ET, she also said that it was her dog Bowie who was the first to sense her cancer, long before she was diagnosed. Apparently the German shepherd began to sniff around that area, whose significance she understood only after the diagnosis.

She also revealed that Bowie was all over her after she had had her surgery and then her chemo. While she was protective of her mistress before as well, at present she has become so tenacious that it is difficult for people to come near her with Bowie around.