Of course it was self-serving. She’s reducing her own chance of getting breast cancer, not anyone else’s (at least, not directly). But it’s absurd to think that aesthetics was a factor in favor of her making this decision. There’s a pretty strong consensus that Ms. Jolie’s natural breasts were quite high on the scale in appearance, and there’s only so much that reconstructive surgery can do. It would be quite remarkable for this procedure to actually improve the appearance of her breasts. It’s conceivable, I suppose, but it’s hardly the most logical explanation for why she did this.
Heh, for real. I don’t think prophylactic mastectomies are readily available on most women’s insurance plans, and my guess is that anyone who isn’t already quite wealthy is going to have a rough time paying for one no matter how much “awareness” celebrities bring to the public about the issue. It is unfortunate, but for now this is really is kind of a “rich people’s medicine” thing.
I’m not an Angelina Jolie fan, especially, but she watched her own mother suffer and die at a young age (57, I believe) from breast cancer. That had to be a life changing experience for her, and something I’m sure she’s thought about as she raises her own children.
She had an opportunity to increase her chances for a long, healthy life, and to spare her children from what she had to experience with her mothers death. I’m glad she made the decision, and I’m glad she decided to tell others. She could have chosen to keep this private, and I couldn’t blame her if she did.
To say that she bought herself “a nice set of tits” is to minimize what had to be one of the toughest decisions of her life. If you want to call avoiding a death by cancer “self-serving” I suppose you can, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t do this to further her career.
Quite a few policies will cover prophylactic organ removal for someone with a proven high risk factor. For example, there’s a genetic flaw that makes colon cancer almost inevitable and it’s now becoming more and more standard for someone proven, via testing, to carry that trait to have their colon removed prior to it becoming cancerous, and it’s usually (although not always) covered. Likewise, someone proven to carry the BCR1 or BCR2 gene could well have a prophylactic mastectomy covered by insurance.
The trick here is getting the testing done. It costs thousands of dollars, and that testing might not be covered at all.
For once, I resent that moderation.
Mine was a tongue-in-cheek response on the surface, albeit built over a serious foundation : she’s an actress and a bona fide sex symbol. Listed as such on Wikipedia and everything. Unlike most other women, her plastique *is *part and parcel of her livelihood. Sexual context and all. No leery, drooly laugh intended - it’s just a fact.
As such, it is a courageous decision for her to risk her mammaries today for (possibly) better health tomorrow.
What was it *other *than 100% self-serving?
A double, scheduled by convenience, that does not have to take into account actual tumors (and chemo), followed by total reconstruction by the best plastic surgeons in Hollywood? Yes, very strange.
Nor is it likely to ever be anything else, which is the basis for my refusal to genuflect at the altar of her great sacrifice. Good for her, good for every woman wealthy and healthy enough to pull such a thing off… now let’s get back to the other 100 million or so women at risk whose course will likely be the same life-wrecking, heartbreaking, body-mangling course women have been going through since at least the 1950s without any real improvement in treatment or survival. Maybe we could all tie on little Angelina-shaped pink ribbons or something.
I didn’t say she did - but if the choice had been ending any part of her career that required her to have a normal woman’s frontal shape, I think she would have waited for a real diagnosis. Had the option for a reconstruction probably better than what she saw in the mirror at 37 not been available, ditto. So yes, her career and its furtherance were an inseparable part of the deal.
She’s going to get $30M for the first movie in which she appears in a bikini, precisely because of all this.
ETA: You have to keep in mind that AJ had this done without the terror of a diagnosis, without any of the painful and drawn-out tests, without radiation or chemo, and without any of the body damage from progressing cancer or the treatments. That changes the entire picture, IMHO.
I do think Ms. Jolie would choose scarred and misshapen over dead, in a heartbeat. And if you think surgically reconstructed breasts look like the real thing sans clothing, think again.
You’d be surprised how many plans actually do cover BRCA mutation testing and prophylactic mastectomies in the appropriate clinical setting (namely, a strong family history of breast cancer). It’s cheaper than paying for therapeutic mastectomy plus chemo and radiation treatments, which is the alternative.
She didn’t have to make that choice; she was cancer-free. Just susceptible.
For the average woman with the average course and limited reconstruction after battling the disease, yes. This case is completely different. I have experience with… 5 women who have had partial or total reconstruction. 2 had model-quality breasts afterwards. It’s the difference between fixing up your daily driver after a bad wreck, within what the insurance company will cover, and perfectly restoring a '61 Jag with an unlimited budget.
An 87% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer is more than merely “susceptible.”
Precisely. The surgeons took off EVERYTHING, right down to the pectoral muscle. No amount of reconstruction is going to give her anything even remotely resembling a nipple and areola. And while the scars will fade with time, they’ll always be there. What she has no is in no way an improvement on her natural breasts.
So, rather than act preemptively, it would have been more courageous for her to live in fear, wait for her cancer diagnosis, suffer through chemotherapy and radiation, and take her family through all that with her? And perhaps die at the end, because she didn’t act quickly enough?
It’s sad that after all these decades of cancer research the best medicine has to offer is mutilating a young woman. I understand the alternative of dying is worse but all those millions spent on research should have provided better answers than this.
I wonder what Jolie’s chance of cancer popping up somewhere else? I lost a cousin to ovarian cancer. It only took three years.
Yeah, sorry we’ve been slow on curing cancer for you, but we’ve been swamped and work has been crazy. Next week I swear we’ll get right on that.
She states that her doctors told her she reduced both her breast and ovarian cancer rates down to less than 5%, from 87 (breast) and 50 (ovarian).
My best friend had a double mastectomy due to breast cancer two years ago. She was lucky in that her tumours were completely removed, and that a further test revealed that her form of breast cancer did not require chemotherapy.
She went through the same procedure as AJ, except for the procedure to save the nipple. She has the new implants, she looks good in clothes, not so good without. Unlike women who have implants over healthy tissue, her implants are uncomfortable, very much so, and this is not something she expected.
I don’t agree that any woman would go through this kind of operation just to keep her breasts perky. It’s major surgery, and very traumatic emotionally.
ETA: I think going public with this serves a purpose, to inform people who might be carriers of the gene that this genetic testing exits, and maybe remind some of us to get that mammogram.
BRCA Testing Granted Preventive Care Designation Under the Affordable Care Act
The tricky part is exactly what “qualifying family history” criteria is used. Going by the criteria used in the UK’s NICE guidelines, for an asymptomatic woman (like Jolie) to qualify for the genetic testing via the NHS, you have to have a close family member who has had breast cancer and tests positive for the BRCA mutation.
I suspect that Ms. Jolie’s mother tested positive for the mutation and that is why she herself got tested. Not that she needed it covered by insurance, but the mutation itself is quite rare, so just randomly getting tested is not usually suggested. Most incidences of breast cancer are not even caused by the mutation. However, for those who have breast cancer and are carriers of the mutation, the disease is more prone to develop at a younger age, the cancer is more virulent and has a higher rate of recurrence.
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It’s sad that after all these decades of cancer research the best medicine has to offer is mutilating a young woman. I understand the alternative of dying is worse but all those millions spent on research should have provided better answers than this.
It’s also encouraging to note that all those millions spent on cancer research helped researchers to identify the gene that has a high probability of causing some forms of breast and ovarian cancer, and offers people an option of stopping the disease before it starts.
The “mutilitation” she has experienced is far less than she would have suffered if the cancer had been allowed to take hold in her body.
Actually, in the NY Times op-ed piece, she says that she went through some pre-procedure so they could keep the nipple.
I think it’s great for her that she did this, but she didn’t even spend one sentence in the op-ed advocating for insurance coverage for this. I’m glad the screening is in the ACA, though. Without that, I have to imagine that the $3,300 DNA test followed by the, what, tens of thousands of dollars for the operation, would be out of reach for most American women.
I was tempted to call to see if my insurance would cover the screening and the preemptive surgery, but I thought it would sound odd coming from a man.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here, but breast cancer treatments have made huge strides since the 1950s. If you’re anything like the average person, you probably know some breast cancer survivors whose disease would have killed them deader than shit had they lived 50 years ago.
The progress in clinical treatment can be largely credited to, yes, awareness- and money-raising campaigns.
This testing fee thing is pretty messed up… I’m guessing it’s some kind of intellectual property monopoly thing someone has going, because there’s no reason that the testing protocol itself needs to be all that resource-intensive.
Yeah, before the ACA a lot of women were deterred from the test out of fear that if they tested positive, it could lead to them becoming uninsurable due to having pre-existing condition. Some were advised to pay for the test cash, under an assumed name. Pathetic.
Depending how SCOTUS rules next month, Myriad may no longer have the monopoly on the BRCA gene mutations. Too little too late though, their patent runs out in two years anyway.