'The doctors were very leery of prescribing too much pain medication because of the risk of addiction - so I was in a lot of pain for weeks and weeks - and I was very angry, both about my diagnosis and about the show being canceled. 'One of the tubes they put in on my left side must have been pressing on a nerve,' she recalls. She continued to struggle with pain after the July 2012 surgery, which also required the removal of 19 lymph nodes. With a strong family history of the disease - both her mother and aunt had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and her aunt had died of it - Bates barely hesitated before deciding on a double mastectomy. The new pain was finally enough of a red flag to send Bates, a survivor of ovarian cancer in 2003, to her doctor, who found that she had stage II breast cancer. 'But I just chalked it up to all the work on the show, and I let months go by.'

'And that past Christmas, just before we were canceled, I had been really exhausted,' says Bates. The award-winning actor was still reeling from NBC's spring cancellation of her series, Harry's Law, just months before when she started noticing strange pains in her abdomen. Even so, she hoped for some kind of sign from the universe that her life was about to get better. Late in the summer of 2012, Kathy Bates felt like she was nearing rock bottom.

Cathy bates