Christina Applegate Says She Lied About Breast Cancer Being a Blessing After Double Mastectomy
Christina Applegate is getting honest about her breast cancer battle.
The 54-year-old Dead to Me actress spoke out about the diagnosis in her new memoir, You With the Sad Eyes.
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If you didn’t know, Christina was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer while getting a routine MRI in 2008 at age 36.
Due to her diagnosis of a BRCA1 genetic mutation, which increases the risk of cancer, she opted to undergo a double mastectomy, later becoming an advocate for early detection screenings and making appearances on TV.
Keep reading to find out more…
“It was my way of coping with how brokenhearted I was to lose my breasts,” she said of her advocacy, via the New York Post.
“To this day, I feel emotionally and physically mangled by what I went through, but the organization mitigates the terrible loss I felt and feel. But there are other ways I know I hurt instead of helped, both others and myself,” she admitted, reflecting on her appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show after the surgery in 2008.
“It should have been a moment to share the truth…I thought I should tell everyone that it was a blessing,” she recalled.
Fellow breast cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge encouraged her, saying:
“Christina, this is a blessing that’s happened to you in your life. Right now, you get to start over, to change everything.”
“Here’s how I feel about that interview now…it was bulls—t,” Christina candidly admitted in the book. (Watch a portion of that interview here.)
“I had lied, thinking I was being uplifting. I was acting like Little Ms. Warrior, but that’s not how I really felt.”
“There I was, talking about f—king blessings when they were going through a living hell. I was setting up a paragon that no one going through cancer could ever rightly live up to,” Christina said.
“The truth was, I was alone and sad and mourning something that is the most intimate and devastating of amputations, and no amount of plastic surgery can ever make up for it,” Christina wrote in her book.
That mindset shaped how she’s since spoken about her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis.
“I’m not going to lie anymore. MS sucks. It’s not like you can get rid of the cancer, get breast reconstruction and move on, which was certainly how I described my journey to Oprah, Robin [Roberts] and others,” she admitted.
“We need to stop ramming blessings down the throats of people in distress. That’s not how we help people. We help people by radical, thoughtful honesty.”
Christina also revealed the celeb she ditched Brad Pitt for at the VMAs when she was a teen.