Angelina Jolie – who lost her mother,
grandmother and aunt to the disease(cancer) – got a call from her doctor two weeks ago with results from a recent blood test.
"I went through what I imagine thousands of other women have felt," Jolie, 39, writes in a New York Times op-ed piece published early Tuesday. "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."
So last week Jolie had "a laparoscopic
bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy." The
surgery revealed a small benign tumor on
one ovary but no signs of cancer in the other tissues. She chose to keep her uterus because there is no history of uterine cancer in her family.
She now wears a small clear patch that
delivers bio-identical estrogen and has a
progesterone IUD inserted in her uterus that will help her maintain a hormonal balance. "Regardless of the hormone replacements I'm taking, I am now in menopause," she acknowledges. "I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes. 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." Jolie says that having the surgery has not
removed all risk: "The fact is I remain prone to cancer." She writes that she is looking for natural ways to strengthen her immune system.
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