Nine months after she revealed she had undergone a preventative double mastectomy, Angelina Jolie has said she has “more surgery to go” before she’s safe from breast cancer.
The 38-year-old actress had both of her breasts removed and then reconstructed in May 2013 after learning she had the BRCA breast cancer gene and now she has confirmed she has to undergo yet another surgery before she is out of the woods.
“There’s still another surgery to have,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “I’ll get advice from all these wonderful people whom I’ve been talking to, to get through that next stage.”
In an open letter to the New York Times the mother-of-six went public with her surgery news last year and says she was overwhelmed with the supportive response.
“I was very, very moved by all the support and kindness from so many people,” she said. “The reason that I wrote it was to try to communicate and help and connect with other women and other families going through the same thing.”
Jolie elected to undergo a total of three surgeries for a preventive double mastectomy after her doctors discovered that she had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer.
Jolie’s mother died at 56 after an almost decade long battle with cancer and her mother’s fate seemed to weigh heavily on the actress’s decision making.
“Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimise the risk as much I could,” wrote Jolie.
Since her surgery Angie has revealed that she has no regrets.
“I’m very happy I made the decision,” she said. “I was fortunate to have great doctors and very, very fortunate to have a good recovery and a project like Unbroken [the film she is directing] to have something to be really focused on, to be getting healthy for and to be able to just get right back to work.”
