Busy Philipps Reveals She Underwent 2 Surgeries After Discovering Rare Brain Tumor: ‘Grateful That I’m Alive’

In a candid interview with PEOPLE, the actress recounts how she learned she had a tumor, the surgery to have it taken out and the complicated recovery

Busy Philipps had two questions for her neurosurgeon after she got the shocking news this past February that she needed an operation to remove a brain tumor. 

One: How soon could she get to work after she recovered? And two: Could the doctor give her a brow lift at the same time he cut the mass from her frontal lobe? 

The actress’s in-jest plastic surgery request was politely denied by Dr. John Golfinos of NYU Langone. “He laughed, and he told me no,” Philipps, 47, recalls. “I was like . . . ‘You should start to think about offering that.’”

Maintaining a sense of humor has helped the plucky Cougar Town alum get through the health crisis, which she is now speaking about publicly for the first time. 

Sitting down with PEOPLE, Philipps — a naturally engaging storyteller who’s displayed her gift in interviews ever since breaking out on NBC’s cult hit Freaks and Geeks in 1999 — recounts the frightening and frenzied experience of having a malignant brain tumor removed weeks before she was set to start filming her new CBS show Cupertino; the agony of telling her daughters Birdie, 18, and Cricket, 13, about her condition; and the support of close friends like her former Dawson’s Creek costar Michelle Williams, who helped her through her complicated recovery. 

“I’m grateful that I’m alive,” says Philipps, who calls this period “the weirdest six months of my life.”

Weird, but also serendipitous. After all, she nearly didn’t get the Prenuvo scan that led to the discovery of the grade 2 oligodendroglioma, a rare slow-growing tumor. Philipps had been interested in getting the scan, a full-body MRI that checks for more than 500 conditions, since she’d read about it on Instagram. 

“I didn’t know why I wanted to get this scan except for the fact that I just did,” says Philipps, who didn’t present any obvious symptoms of having a tumor, such as seizures.

But when she asked her primary care doctor about getting a scan back in 2025, he said there was “no need” because she’s young and healthy and the blood work from her annual physical was fine. So she floated the idea to her cousin’s husband, Beverly Hills internist Dr. Justin Donlan, who told her “knowledge is power” when it comes to overall wellness. “What he said really resonated with me,” she remembers.

Philipps, who lives in New York City, initially scheduled her scan for January, but a blizzard forced her to push the appointment to Feb. 12. 

It was an emotional and hectic time. Her friend and former Dawson’s Creek costar James Van Der Beek had died of colon cancer the day before. And the day after, she was due to take a meeting with Robert and Michelle King, the creators of Cupertino, for a potential role. What’s more, she was also set to fly to Arizona — where she was raised in Scottsdale by parents Barbara, a real estate agent, and Joe, a consultant — to help out her older sister Leigh Ann, who was undergoing a medical procedure of her own.

Talking with her ex-husband and close friend, filmmaker Marc Silverstein, she considered bailing. “Should I just cancel it?’ ” Philipps remembers asking Silverstein, who invoked Van Der Beek. “He’s like, ‘Maybe it’s the best thing you could do for your friend this morning. Go get that scan.’”

The results showed cause for concern. Philipps had just finished meeting with the Kings about Cupertino and was getting ready to head to a fashion show when Donlan told her the scan showed a lesion on her brain. Based on the shape, he was able to rule out glioblastoma, an aggressive cancerous tumor with no cure. But he told Philipps she needed a follow-up MRI as soon as possible to get a closer look at what exactly the lesion was.

True to her nature, Philipps managed to make light of the situation. “The texts to my ex-husband are comical. While I was on the phone with Dr. Donlan, I texted Marc, ‘OMG I have a brain tumor.’ And he wrote back, ‘Busy, what? What are you saying? What are you talking about?’ I was like, ‘It looks fine. It’s probably benign. I don’t know.’” 

The next several days were a whirlwind: an MRI, a preplanned trip to Los Angeles to film a guest spot on the Netflix series Bad Thoughts — and a call with Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist at NYU Langone, who reviewed her MRI. (She had asked Devinksy for help because he treats her daughter Birdie for epilepsy.)

“‘This is a real tumor, and it’s inside your brain. And Busy, it’s got to come out,’ ” Philipps recalls him saying on the phone. “I was hyperventilating and trying to breathe.” 

Complicating matters, she learned the same morning that she’d been cast on Cupertino, which was set to start shooting in the spring. 

Hoping to keep the job, Philipps initially kept quiet about her condition to the Kings. But she did, however, have a hard talk with her daughters, whom she was protecting up until the point when she had solid information. 

Birdie, recalls Philipps, “was kind of beside herself and really, really scared and overwhelmed with emotion,” she says. “I just kept saying to her, ‘Birdie, you’re just not in the movie where your mom dies your senior year of high school. That’s just not the movie that you’re in. I promise you.’ ” 

Cricket, on the other hand, was calmer. “Her reaction when I told her was like, ‘Okay. You’re going to be fine?’ And I was like, ‘I’m totally going to be fine.’ And she’s like, ‘Okay.’ ”

Devinsky introduced Philipps to his colleague Dr. Golfinos, who scheduled the surgery for March 2. Silverstein accompanied her to the hospital for the roughly five-hour procedure, during which the mass in her brain, which measured 2.6 centimeters, was removed and biopsied.

That’s when the mass was discovered to be an oligodendroglioma, a tumor defined by two genetic alterations, that’s found in just 1,100 to 1,300 people per year in the U.S., according to Dr. Alexandra Miller, Philipps’s neuro-oncologist at NYU Langone.

“It is considered malignant, but it has the best prognosis of all of the malignant gliomas,” says Miller. “It’s sort of defined as a cancerous tumor based on the ability of the tumor to regrow over time, rather than it looking very malignant under the microscope.”

Philipps’s early detection, before she had any symptoms, was beneficial, Golfinos notes. If she had waited until she was having seizures, the tumor — which was a grade 2 on a scale of 2 to 4 — “would have been two or three times the size. It might have been much harder to take the whole thing out,” he says.

Philipps came through the surgery without incident. Within a day she was living up to the nickname she earned in childhood, Busy (which had quickly replaced her given name, Elizabeth).

“I was walking around the hospital. . . . A few of my nurses did say to me that patients like me worry them the most because it feels like you’re not going to slow down enough,” says Philipps.

Two days after the surgery, she was home recovering with a steady stream of well-wishers, including Dying for Sex actress Williams, who also arranged “delicious” food service. Though Philipps had some swelling in her forehead, and more than 40 surgical staples, “I wasn’t in pain at all.”

With the surgery behind her, Philipps was free to start her “dream” job on Cupertino, playing Natalia Boutella, the wealthy and flamboyant financial backer of a Silicon Valley law firm that represents the struggling Davids in a town full of Goliaths. (By then Philipps had confided in the Kings about her condition. They were “wonderful,” she says.) 

But not long into filming the series in April, Philipps faced a frightening setback when she went to get Botox from her dermatologist, who saw the incision site from the surgery. 

“She’s like, ‘That doesn’t look right. I’m not going to touch it….Can I take a picture of it and will you send it to your surgeons right now?’…And I did and they immediately were like, ‘That doesn’t look good.’”

Another day, another doctor. Philipps saw a wound care specialist who put her on antibiotics, but ultimately she ended up back in the hospital: Philipps had contracted staphylococcus in her incision and needed debridement surgery to clear the infection and remove one of the tiny titanium tacks put in her skull during the initial surgery to hold the bone in place. 

“Fortunately, we got to it early, so it wasn’t a deep infection,” says Golfinos, who was present for the April 27 procedure.

Philipps, however, didn’t feel so fortunate at that moment. “The second surgery really threw me. I just felt like I was back to square one, and I was really, really upset.” 

Still, as she had after the initial surgery, Philipps soon “bounced right back,” says Golfinos. “She really was indomitable.”

While some might consider what she went through to be a nightmare, Philipps is thankful: for the scan that caught the tumor early, for her dermatologist, who spotted the staph infection — and for everything else that went her way. “What am I? The luckiest girl in the world?” she asks.

Philipps was lucky, perhaps, but also vigilant about her health — which she will continue to be going forward. And while she doesn’t need chemotherapy or radiation, Philipps will get regular scans to monitor for a potential recurrence. But Golfinos notes, “She really has a great chance that this may not recur.” 

Looking back, Philipps wonders if some of the “extreme emotional reactions” she’d been experiencing over the past couple years, including crying until she vomited and sending “inflammatory” texts when she was angry, were a result of the tumor pressing on her frontal lobe, and not perimenopause as she’d assumed. 

“I remember saying something to Golfinos about that. He’s like, ‘Well, we don’t really know,’ ” says Philipps. 

But Williams had pointed out something else during the whole ordeal. “She said, ‘Busy, you have been saying for the past two years, My brain feels broken.’ And she was right. I have. I’ve been saying this for the last few years. . . . I wasn’t consciously aware that anything was really wrong, but there was something that was misfiring. Like, I could not get a handle on it.” And now, post-surgery? “My brain does not feel broken anymore.”

She hopes her experience can be a lesson to other people, especially women, to listen to their instincts. 

“We are frequently told by doctors that there is nothing to worry about [when] you kind of know that there’s something to worry about,” she says. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in having information. It’s only empowering.” 

Via: People