Like many women her age, Maura Tierney found herself on the receiving end of a breast cancer diagnosis, and thankfully she caught it early.

The “ER” actress told press, "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 the one thing I will say: Don't be afraid to go to the damn doctor. Just go!"

Ms. Tierney continued, "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."

"It turned out to be a more aggressive kind of cancer than they thought,” she said, adding that ten years earlier they wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between her kind of cancer and other, less threatening types of the disease. “He said they would have patted me on the head and told me, 'You're cured,' and I would have died of breast cancer."

"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."