Everything about her Hollywood life melted away when Edie Falco, known for her star turns on the hit television series The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie, received a diagnosis for breast cancer.

It was 2003, while she was working on The Sopranos. The diagnosis happened in the morning. “I remember I had to be at work at one [in the afternoon],” Falco said Wednesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego. It was “surreal” to receive the news, she said: “You go into some sort of hyper reality.”