I seriously thought about taking a personal day to mourn the loss of Angelina Jolie‘s boobs, but I will not let Jennifer Aniston and Chelsea Handler win. So here is the Jolie’s op-ed in The New York Times that blew up the Internet today in which she reveals that she had both breasts removed in February because she had a 87% chance of getting cancer.
MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was…..They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer. My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman. Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average. Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex. On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work….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, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options. Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.
Since she’s Jennifer Aniston’s lapdog, I’ll leave it to Chelsea Handler to make jokes about this, but if you want to sit here and say that Angelina Jolie wasn’t the form of female perfection for more than a decade, either you don’t have a penis or you go to sleep with your Friends boxset. I would write more, but my penis has cried so much that he’s made himself sick.
