Constance Zimmer spent much of this year promoting “Love Story,” the FX series that earned her an Emmy nomination. Privately, she was being treated for breast cancer.
The actress, 55, revealed her diagnosis in an Instagram post on Sunday, Oct. 4, timing it to Breast Cancer Awareness Month. “October is #breastcancerawarenessmonth and I never thought I’d be honoring it with my own story,” she wrote. The good news came at the end of the post: She is now cancer-free.
‘The silence was deafening’
Zimmer said she learned of her diagnosis on March 13 during a Zoom call with her doctor while she was away from home. It was DCIS, short for ductal carcinoma in situ, which is also known as Stage 0 breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute describes DCIS as abnormal cells in the lining of the breast’s milk ducts that have not spread into surrounding breast tissue.
“The silence was deafening,” she wrote. Her first steps, she said, were calling her husband and getting home so she could tell their daughter face to face.
The stretch that followed was draining, Zimmer said, as she ended up seeing more doctors than she wanted to. Most pointed her toward a mastectomy as the fastest way to remove the mass. “What if that’s not what I want? What if I want to save my boob instead?” she wrote.
She found a different path with breast surgeon Dr. Kristi Funk, who told her she was confident a lumpectomy could work. “She was the first doctor to make me feel like what I wanted mattered and that made me weep with joy,” Zimmer wrote. The approach took three operations over three consecutive weeks, she said, but her breast was saved.
Treatment during an Emmy run
Zimmer kept her health private while on what she called “a very public press tour” for FX’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette,” in which she played Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s mother, Ann Messina Freeman. Radiation followed, and she was still going through it as she celebrated her Emmy nomination for supporting actress in a limited or anthology series or movie. It is her second Emmy nomination; the first came in 2016 for “UnREAL.”
In a video marking a week of radiation, she called the experience “super surreal” and said she was “just breathing through it literally and figuratively.” Her post paired photos from the hospital with a glammed-up portrait from her first photo shoot since the diagnosis.
“I’m grateful to be CANCER FREE,” she wrote, describing the past seven months as “pure shock and fear alongside pure joy and gratitude.” She summed it up this way: “From hospital gowns to Emmy glamour this was one hell of a ride.”
A push to get checked
Zimmer said she and her co-host decided to bring her breast surgeon onto “Talk Fifty to Me,” their podcast about life after 50, to tell the full story. Talking about it, she wrote, can “remind women to please not wait until you have symptoms to get yourself checked in all ways possible.”
What’s next
The “Talk Fifty to Me” episode featuring Zimmer’s surgeon, which she said will share “the whole story,” is due out Tuesday, Oct. 6.
