New Delhi, March 25 – Two years after Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy to prevent the onset of breast cancer, the actress has revealed that she has since had her ovaries removed due to a second health scare.
The 39-year-old Maleficent star published a lengthy opinion piece, titled Angelina Jolie Pitt: Diary Of A Surgery in the New York Times on Monday, explaining her decision. With her ovaries and fallopian tubes now gone, the mother-of six has entered early menopause and will not be able to have any more children, she writes in her candid, deeply personal essay.
In May 2013, Jolie famously had her breasts surgically removed after she found out she was carrying a genetic mutation that greatly increased her risk of potentially fatal breast cancer.
In the op-ed piece, Brad Pitt’s wife explains that the mutation in the BRCA1 gene gave her an estimated 87 per cent risk of breast cancer and 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer. The director of Unbroken and the upcoming By The Sea-starring her newly-wed husband-has lost her mother and grandmother to ovarian cancer and her aunt to breast cancer.
According to Jolie, she had been planning to undergo surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes for a while now, but a call from her doctor two weeks ago made the procedure more urgent.
A blood test detected potential anomalies linked to the protein CA-125, which is used to monitor ovarian cancer, Jolie’s doctor told her, urging the actress to see her surgeon, who also had treated her late mother.
“I went through what I imagine thousands of other women have felt,” she writes. “I told myself to stay calm, to be strong, and that I had no reason to think I wouldn’t live to see my children grow up and to meet my grandchildren.”
Pitt was in France when he got the call from his wife of seven months about her new health scare, prompting him to hop on a plane and return at once to Los Angeles to be by her side. After undergoing a battery of tests and scans, Jolie got the good news that she was still cancer-free.
“To my relief, I still had the option of removing my ovaries and fallopian tubes. And I chose to do it,” she writes. Last week, Hollywood’s leading lady went under the knife, undergoing what is known as a laparoscopic bilateral salpingo oophorectomy.
Jolie revealed that one of her ovaries did have a small tumour on it but it turned out to be benign, and there were no sign of cancer in the tissues. She noted that she chose to keep her uterus because there is no history of uterine cancer in her family.
To counteract the loss of her ovaries, Jolie turned to hormone replacement therapy and had a device inserted in her womb. “Regardless of the hormone replacements I’m taking, I am now in menopause,” she writes. “But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.”
She points out that surgery has not eliminated her natural predisposition for cancer, but it has taken at least one type of the deadly disease out of the equation. “I know my children will never have to say, ‘Mom died of ovarian cancer’,” the UN envoy writes.
-INDIA TODAY
