We haven’t heard much from former ER actress Maura Tierney since she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and had to give up her planned role on Parenthood. (She was slated to play the single mom now portrayed by Lauren Graham.) In a new interview with Parade magazine, Tierney, 45, talks about what she went through when she learned she had breast cancer and how she dealt with her treatment. I really admire her attitude about the whole thing, which is basically that it was difficult but that she’s lucky she had great insurance and the means to take time off to get treatment. She says she has no great “wisdom to drop on anybody yet” about what she’s been through but that it was hard for her to accept that she needed to let people help her for once. Here’s some of her interview, which will appear in full in Sunday’s issue of Parade:

Despite having spent hundreds of hours playing a physician, she had never been comfortable with medicine in real life.
“I was so, so scared of going to the doctor. I felt something, and my boyfriend at the time made me go. He said, ‘You’ve got to take care of this,’ because I was afraid. That’s one thing I will say: Don’t be afraid to go to the damn doctor. Just go!”

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.”

The cancer arc is something she has not yet fully processed.
“I’ve been misquoted a lot, and there’s this tendency for people to put on to you how they think you should be or what they think you should feel. The truth is, I had my surgery, and I have two more months on this one drug. I haven’t figured out where I want to focus my energies to help others, and I don’t know what kind of wisdom to drop on anybody yet–except for, you know, they can help people now. I feel an immense sense of gratitude, but sometimes I think there should be room for more gratitude [in me], because I can still be bitchy in the morning…”

It’s that sense of empathy with an edge that seeps into most of the people she plays, including her new role as a prosector on ABC’s legal drama, The Whole Truth.
“Even though my new show isn’t a comedy, I see the humor in my character. There’s something funny about her tunnel vision. At work, she sees things as very black and white. I don’t have that kind of clarity. I’m here… I’m there…”

Some hard-won wisdom.
“There is one thing I’ve learned for sure. It’s a life-changing thing to be in a position of needing help and being so lucky as to get it. And to feel like that’s okay. You can’t just take care of everybody else all the time. That’s almost as perspective-changing as the illness. For someone like me, that was kind of tough.”

[From Parade]

US Weekly has a little more on the interview, and they mention that Tierney’s dad died in December, 2009. A friend of hers is quoted as saying “It must have been the hardest time of her life – but she still maintained her core and her sense of humor. And God bless her, she had to go bald to her dad’s funeral.”

I’m really happy for her that she’s been able to come out on the other side of this and that she has a new show coming out. The Whole Truth premieres on ABC on September 22 and will air Wednesdays at 10:00 pm EST. It also stars Rob Morrow.

Photos courtesy of Parade, where there are more.