Shannen Doherty Said She Was Going Through the 'Hardest Time' She'd 'Ever Had' Prior to Her Death from Cancer

Shannen Doherty was in the midst of a challenging chapter in her health journey in the weeks before her death.

Doherty died after a years-long battle with cancer on Saturday, July 13, her longtime publicist Leslie Sloan told PEOPLE on July 14. Prior to her death, she gave Katherine Heigl an update on her health during an episode of her Let's Be Clear podcast.

The actress, who was 53, first detailed the timeline of her battle with cancer, as she told Heigl, "I got cancer in 2015, and it went to remission, I think, right at the end of 2017 or at the beginning of 2018, and then it came back in 2019 as stage 4 breast cancer, but then it spread to my bones. And from there, it spread to my brain."

"There's so many protocols. Eventually – it's stage 4 cancer — eventually those protocols are gonna stop working. And you just hope that you are on one long enough for them to actually come up with another protocol and another protocol... so it's really hard," she said. "This is probably the hardest time for me that I've ever had with the cancer."

"I've always kinda felt very positive and, like, I can deal with it, and this is definitely like — I'm overly emotional," Doherty added. "I wanna cry every single second at good or bad things."

Doherty also reflected on how her time living with stage 4 breast cancer influenced how she thought about her life, as she told Heigl, "What's really beautiful about it is, I think you become so incredibly sensitive that your eyes are, like, wide open to everything around you, to people, to how they react, to what you can possibly do that's better for the world, like, what your -

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purpose here is."

"Because I think I struggled with that kind of my entire life, being a child actor and then growing up acting, and I just never felt like I was accepted," she continued. "I always, you know, looked at the Friends crew and was like, 'Oh my god. I wanna hang out with Jen Aniston and Courteney Cox.' And, you know, 'Why doesn't anybody accept me, and why am I always called the bad girl?'"

"For me, cancer was that moment where I was like, 'Oh, hell no.' I don't need to hang out with any of these people. I need to make sure I'm happy and living the best life that I can while I'm still alive."

In a previous episode of her podcast, Doherty had shared that she was starting a new round of chemotherapy to continue to treat her cancer.

"I go in for my first run of chemo, and to just be walking into the unknown, I just feel like my life has been unknown for over a year now between divorce and cancer," she said on the June 23 episode.

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"It becomes very real in an incredibly different way because I have no idea how long I'm gonna be on the chemo for. I have no idea if it's gonna be, you know, three months or if it's gonna be six months or if we're gonna – you know, if after three months, it's not working, if we're gonna change again," she continued. "That's not something that I can predict. It's not something my doctors can predict. And it's scary."

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