Maura Tierney ‘I Was So Lucky’ | Parade.com.

Her breast-cancer diagnosis was not a “Why me?” moment.

“I was so lucky. I had insurance, I found a great team of doctors at UCLA, and I could afford not to work while I was getting treated. From the beginning my doctor told me, ‘You’re going to be okay,’ and I chose to believe him. So there was always that in my head.”

After she underwent surgery in the summer of 2009, the final pathology report threw Tierney another curve.

“It turned out to be a more aggressive kind of cancer than they thought,” she explains. Only a decade earlier, her doctor told her, pathologists wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “He said they would have patted me on the head and told me, ‘You’re cured,’ and I would have died of breast cancer.”