ABC/Lorenzo Bevilaqua(LOS ANGELES) — Kate Walsh has played a doctor on TV, but two years ago she found herself dealing with her own health crisis.
The former Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice actress reveals to Cosmopolitan that she had a benign brain tumor removed in 2015. She says symptoms of fatigue and losing her train of thought prompted her to get checked out.
“The words ‘brain tumor’ were never in my zeitgeist,” Walsh tells the mag. “I went in for the MRI, and you know it’s serious when they don’t even wait, they’re like, ‘hey, the radiologist wants to see you.’ And she starts to say ‘well, it looks like you have a very sizable brain tumor,’ and I just left my body… It was never anything I would have imagined.”
Walsh says her medical role on TV didn’t make things any easier for her.
“It was the total opposite! You’d think that after playing Dr. Addison for the better part of a decade, where I spent more time on a hospital set than at my house, that I would feel somehow more comfortable, but I was such a little scaredy-cat,” she says.
Ultimately, the surgery was a success, and Walsh took nine months off to recover — which wasn’t easy for her. “I love to work hard and do 800 things at once, and this was a really amazing lesson in just submitting to the process of healing,” she says.
The biggest thing Walsh learned? “Go see a doctor!” she says. “…We should go get a checkup the same way we go to the gym, just preventatively, instead of waiting for something to go wrong.”
In order to encourage more people to get their annual check-ups, Walsh is partnering with Cigna as part their TV Doctors campaign.
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