Actress Danielle Fishel has revealed that she has been diagnosed with an early stage of breast cancer and will be undergoing surgery.
The star of the American sitcom is widely recognized for her portrayal of Topanga Lawrence, the romantic partner of main character Cory Matthews, portrayed by Ben Savage, from 1993 to 2000.
The duo also appeared in Disney’s spin-off series, Girl Meets World, which aired from 2014 to 2017 and featured US pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter.
“I was recently diagnosed with DCIS, which stands for Ductal carcinoma in situ, which is a form of breast cancer,” Fishel said on the Pod Meets World podcast she shares with her Boy Meets World co-stars Rider Strong and Will Friedle.
Strong, who played Cory’s on-screen best friend Shawn Hunter, and and Friedle, who played Cory’s older brother Eric Matthews, were “two of the first people” Fishel told about her diagnosis.
“It is very, very, very early, it’s technically stage zero,” the 43-year-old said.“I’m going to be fine, I’m having surgery to remove it, I’m going to be on some follow-up treatment – I’ve had to make a lot of decisions over the last couple of days.”
Fishel said she thought she would be the “suffer in silence” type and would not tell anyone outside of her intimate circle until she was “on the other side of it”.
However, reading work from US author Glennon Doyle helped change her mind.
“She (Doyle) often talks about how a lot of people like to save sharing their experiences until they’ve come out the other side of it, so that they’re able to say ‘here’s the pretty picture of it all, here’s what I’ve learned, the end of the story’.
“But the place you have the most to learn from is at the very beginning of the story or at the messy middle of a story.”
Fishel said her first instinct was to “clam up” and only share the news with her immediate family and was only going to tell “a few select friends”.
She noted that as she engaged in conversations with more individuals, she discovered an increasing number of people who had similar experiences related to their cancer diagnoses.
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