14 DAY TRIAL // The other day, in a beautiful op-ed for the New York Times, actress and director Angelina Jolie revealed that, after another cancer scare, 2 years after undergoing a double mastectomy, she had her ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed to decrease the odds of getting cancer.
The announcement was welcomed with warm praise by the medical community (because it made sure to stress surgery wasn’t the only option for women in her situation), but also by celebrities and regular women. Kelly Osbourne is following her example of speaking out on it.
Kelly has “the cancer gene”
Kelly taped another appearance for CBS’ The Talk (video below), where, this time, she stood in for her mother, longtime co-host, Sharon Osbourne. Jolie’s news had just broken, so naturally, her decision to have her ovaries and Fallopian tubes removed, and how brave she was about going public with it came up.
Kelly revealed that she too had “the cancer gene,” as revealed by tests her mother made her take regularly since she too was diagnosed with cancer. Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002 and then had a preventive double mastectomy in 2012, when tests revealed she carried the cancer gene.
Speaking about Angelina, Kelly says she too will probably have to go down the same path, after she has had children.
“I agree with this 100 percent. I know that one day I will eventually have to do it too because if I have children, I want to be there to bring them up. I want to be there to support them in every way I can,” she says. “It’s something I applaud Angelina for because she’s bringing attention to this, and people are now going to go out and get tested for it.”
Josh Groban, who was a guest on the show, also praised Jolie for getting the conversation on cancer started and thus contributing to removing the stigma.
The Angelina effect
This is how the media and health specialists described what happened 2 years ago, when Jolie revealed she had had a double mastectomy because she was running very high risks of developing breast cancer.
Jolie has lost her mother, her grandmother and her aunt to cancer, and she was at risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The decision to have her ovaries removed was put off until now because tests always came back ok.
The fact that someone as famous and as respected as Jolie talks about it so openly leads to an increase in awareness about the need to get tested. However, Angelina did more than just talk about her own struggles: in both op-eds, she strove to get the message across that surgery wasn’t the first and only option.
Moreover, she urged women to get tested and to see specialists that could advise them which path to take. In her case, surgery was best, but that doesn’t mean the same applies to everybody else.
