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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 10:26:10 GMT -8
LONDON - Hollywood star Angelina Jolie has had a double mastectomy to reduce her chances of getting breast cancer and says she hopes her story will inspire other women fighting the life-threatening disease. Jolie wrote in the New York Times on Tuesday the operation had made it easier for her to reassure her six children that she will not die young from cancer, like her own mother did at 56. “We often speak of ’Mommy’s mommy’, and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me,” wrote Jolie, 37. “I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a ’faulty’ gene.” The Oscar-winning actress said her doctors had estimated she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. “Once I knew this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much as I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy,” she said. Partner and fellow Hollywood star Brad Pitt was by Jolie’s side through three months of treatment that ended late in April, she said. The two got engaged last year. Jolie said that even though she had kept silent about her treatment while it was going on, she hoped her story would now help other women. “I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested.” Breast cancer alone kills about 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization. It is estimated that one in 300 to one in 500 women carry a BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 gene mutation, as Jolie does. OPENNESS PRAISED CNN anchor Zoraida Sambolin announced on Tuesday that she had breast cancer and was also getting a double mastectomy. Sambolin, who anchors CNN’s “Early Start” morning show, discussed her condition on the show while talking about Jolie’s procedure. “I struggled for weeks trying to figure out how tell you that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was leaving to have surgery,” Sambolin, 47, said on Facebook. “Then ... Angelina Jolie shares her story of a double mastectomy and gives me strength and an opening.” Jolie’s decision was also welcomed by breast cancer patients and charities. Richard Francis, head of research at the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity in Britain, said it demonstrated the importance of educating women with the gene fault. “For women like Angelina it’s important that they are made fully aware of all the options that are available, including risk-reducing surgery and extra breast screening,” Francis told Reuters. Breast Cancer Campaign Chief Executive Baroness Delyth Morgan said Jolie’s openness in talking about her experience and her decision to have surgery would raise awareness of the disease and its risk. Jolie won a 1999 best supporting actress Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted”. She lends her star power to a range of humanitarian campaigns, including serving more than 10 years as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. In April, she urged governments to step up efforts to bring wartime sex offenders to justice.
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Post by ♬ pkbucko ♬ on May 14, 2013 10:35:11 GMT -8
I do not understand radical preventive mastectomy. Just as I wouldn't understand removal of any organ until it was in fact diseased. Or at least until you KNOW it's happening.
I would assume that these types of conversations were taking place between her and her physicians, and I would guess that this wound up being the best option. But it seems so wrong to cut off a part of the body that is not yet diseased.
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 10:38:35 GMT -8
I know, it certainly is controversial, I do hear of it happening more often.
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Post by domic on May 14, 2013 11:16:33 GMT -8
So sad.
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 11:27:53 GMT -8
Of course, Angelina Jolie is not the first actress to have had a mastectomy, that most medical of terms referring to the removal of at least one of the anatomical attributes that actresses are expected to hoik up for the sake of their career. In fact, off the top of my head, I can name four: Christina Applegate, Olivia Newton John, Lynn Redgrave and Kathy Bates have all publicly discussed their mastectomies. Nor is she the first to have a preventive double mastectomy: Sharon Osbourne (not an actress but very much a woman in the public eye) announced only last year that she had one after discovering, as she told Hello! magazine, that she had "the breast-cancer gene". Yet while Jolie may not be the first, she has done something that is – by any standards – pretty extraordinary and brave, even on top of having a preventive double mastectomy. She is certainly the highest-profile woman to make such an announcement in a long time, and she is arguably one with the most at stake. For a young, beautiful actress to announce that she has had her breasts removed is, as career moves go, somewhat akin to a handsome leading man announcing he is gay, and that is disgusting and ridiculous on both counts. Ultimately, she has challenged not just her own public image but also the wearisome cliche of what makes a woman sexy, and how a woman considered to be sexy talks about her body. Judging from her clear, calm and plain-speaking article in the New York Times discussing why she elected to undergo a double mastectomy, Jolie views publicising her decision as simply a matter of public service: "I chose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know they have strong options," she writes, while acknowledging the issues of financial access that prevent too many women from getting tested and treated. Jolie is by now surely used to having certain parts of her body scrutinised by the media – more than most other female celebrities, in fact, and that is truly saying something. Her body shape is often watched for signs of an incipient eating disorder. Her leg got its own Twitter feed after the 2012 Academy Awards. The most personal elements of her life have long been part of the pop-cultural discourse, from her troubled relationship with her difficult father, to her children, to her marriages, to the eternal hoo-hah over the Aniston-Pitt-Jolie triangle that, one suspects, has fascinated the tabloids far longer than it has the participants. Yet Jolie herself has always maintained the kind of personal privacy that now only the most A-list of actresses can afford. She rarely gives interviews and she doesn't pose next to naked on the cover of men's magazines. Even as Lara Croft, her most obviously sexy role, she generally wore a bodysuit as opposed to a bikini. For a woman who has routinely won in those most crucial of elections – the Sexiest Woman in the World – Jolie has, really, never shown much interest in sharing herself or her body with the public. This makes her decision to do so now in the most personal of ways more powerful, but also, to a certain degree, more understandable. For almost a decade now, she has been very determinedly trying to move away from the kind of sexualised films that made her famous, such as Tomb Raider and the eminently forgettable Original Sin with Antonio Banderas, in favour of movies such as A Mighty Heart and Changeling, in which she played, respectively, a grief-struck widow and a grief-struck mother, arguably at the cost of her career. For all her much-vaunted sexiness, Jolie has not relied on her body for acting roles for a long time (and at times, it has looked like she wasn't even that interested in acting, full stop, preferring instead to focus on her UN work and motherhood). As such, for her then to announce how she has altered it is not quite as potentially career-altering for her as it would be for those who have been led to believe that their breasts are the only currency they have to offer. Jolie ends her New York Times article discussing the "challenges" of life, but this is a rare instance of her opting for euphemisms. In earlier paragraphs, with the kind of forthrightness one rarely sees from any member of the entertainment industry, she proffers descriptions of her "nipple delay", the removal of her breast tissue, temporary fillers, expanders, tubes, blood, scarring and bruising. "I do not feel any less of a woman," she writes. "I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity."
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 12:55:21 GMT -8
I know, it certainly is controversial, I do hear of it happening more often. I wonder how many guys would be willing get all their tackle removed ? Who knows? Apparently Angelina got the reconstructive surgery, you won't be able to tell the difference.
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Post by domic on May 14, 2013 13:13:13 GMT -8
She is in about the most secure financial position to do this. She could never work again and she would never run out of money.
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 13:15:56 GMT -8
She is in about the most secure financial position to do this. She could never work again and she would never run out of money. Is she worthless as an actress now? Does she have no value because her breast have been replaced?
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Post by domic on May 14, 2013 13:20:30 GMT -8
No, I'm just saying that she didn't really risk all that much by telling everyone. if she never worked again, it wouldn't effect her lifestyle much I'm guessing. I think it was pretty sharp of her to talk about it actually.
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 15:03:25 GMT -8
87, but who is counting. ( )
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2013 15:58:21 GMT -8
Fact is most men wouldn't even do surgery they do need let alone do some that is preventative. Its a fact that approximately 80% of male deaths in america are from illness that men let go til it was too late.
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