Jenna Fischer Talks Cancer Shocker In Candid Interview - Learn How She Found Out & How Her Family Handled It!

Jenna Fischer is getting candid about her breast cancer diagnosis — and how it affected her family.

In case you didn’t hear the sad news, the Walk Hard star took to Instagram to share that she’d been diagnosed with Stage 1 triple positive breast cancer last year. The diagnosis came as a shock to fans and followers as Jenna, who played beloved receptionist Pam Beesly on The Office, kept it under wraps for so long. Luckily, in the post she revealed she was cancer free through the power of modern medicine, and thankfully has better days ahead of her:

“After completing surgery, chemotherapy and radiation I am now cancer free.”

AH-Mazing!

Now that she’s on the mend, she’s decided to open up more about her journey. On Monday, Jenna went on The Today Show where she discussed the impact her diagnosis had on herself and her family.

First, it was a really slow burn way of learning what was happening. THANK GOODNESS she went for an annual mammogram — just a checkup, there wasn’t even anything noticeably wrong. But at first after that October 2023 exam she believed everything was probably fine:

“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.'”

OK, some followups… but she felt “no level of concern.” Then she got the ultrasound, and they recommended a biopsy — bc there was a “10% chance it’s cancerous.” Uh huh. So she had that done and one day during a hike saw that the results came in:

“I checked the portal on the hike, and that’s when I saw words like invasive, ductal, carcinoma, malignant. And I was like, ‘Those words sound like cancer words.'”

She said she was in “disbelief” — calling her husband, Lee Kirk, to tell him she still wasn’t even sure it was cancer yet.

Once they did know, they had an “honest” conversation with her children — son Weston, 13, and daughter Harper, 10. She explained how she did everything she could to make things easier for the kiddos:

“They’re 10 and they’re 13, and they were going to be living in the house while I went through this. They’re going to see it. And the biggest thing that I wanted them to know was that any ways that I seemed sick during this process were side effects of treatments. They weren’t cancer making me sick.”

Awwww… A mom’s work is truly never done. The 50-year-old went on to say that telling her children this really put them “at ease” throughout her entire treatment:

“That distinction, I think, really put them at ease. And then we just kind of did it together. And they were amazing.”

Jenna also praised hubby Lee for all the help he put in while she was going through her illness:

“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. Now I’m getting emotional about it, but, you know, the most I could do was just get downstairs and sit at the table with a cup of coffee, and he did all the rest.”

A supportive family is SO important to have during times like these, and that’s exactly what she had.

But the most important thing to take away from Jenna’s interview? That annual mammogram! It probably saved her life! She explained:

“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. I’m really lucky that my cancer had not spread into my lymph nodes. It hadn’t spread anywhere else in my body. My tumor was still very small, too small to feel. 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.”

So make those appointments, ladies! As annoying and uncomfortable as they are!

See the full interview (below):