14 DAY TRIAL // In Octobert this year, E! News correspondent Giuliana Rancic announced she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer, saying she was lucky it'd been caught on early. Faced later on with a decision for the best treatment, Giuliana chose a double mastectomy.
The television personality and reality star was on The Today Show the other day to announce her decision, also in the hope that it will help other women understand that it does not mean the end for them as women.
This is also the reason why Giuliana, always accompanied by her husband Bill, has been so open about her cancer battle so far: she wants women to do their best to find cancer in the early stages because prevention is better than treatment.
Her appearance on The Today Show is below, embedded at the end of the article.
Bill explains that Giuliana had to consider mastectomy after being told that the cancer hadn't been taken out completely from one breast.
“We were left with the decision, do you go back and do another lumpectomy and try to clean it out or go forward with a more radical procedure?” Bill says.
Though Giuliana wouldn't even think about a mastectomy at first, she realized that the other course of treatment also meant putting off trying to get pregnant by at least several years, while it would also decrease her quality of life considerably.
“To be honest, all it came down to was choosing to live and not looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. It could have come back more aggressively next time, so for me it was just more important to get the cancer out,” she says.
“With the double mastectomy I now have less than one per cent chance of getting it back, otherwise it was 20, 30 or 40 per cent chance and for me it wasn't worth it,” Giuliana explains.
She also says that she had a dear friend show her what a mastectomy actually meant, thus convincing her that the intervention didn't mean she'd be “disfigured” for life.
“Bill said to me, 'I just need you around for the next 50 years, kid. I don't care about the physical portion of this, so let's just get you healthy',” Giuliana says of how Bill helped her see what was more important that fretting over her looks: her health.