Menopause, which is every woman’s dread, after labour pain, doesn’t seem to have caused too many sleepless nights for Angelina Jolie. “I actually love being in menopause,” the 40-year-old actress told The Daily Telegraph in a story published on Sunday.
Jolie underwent a double mastectomy and surgery recently to get her ovaries removed after she was detected positive for BRCA1, a cancerian gene that proved fatal for her mother, grandmother and a growing number of women around the world. Getting her ovaries removed means no risk of cancer in that quarter, but it also brings on early menopause, something which most other women who underwent the same surgery have struggled with, many of them as young as in their early thirties.
The double mastectomy done in 2013 proved to be a minor challenge for her, as she started filming and directing her movie, By The Sea, almost immediately after it and had to do a nude bathing scene.
“I realized it was going to be me [naked] in that bathtub,” the 40-year-old Oscar winner told The New York Times.
“But I told myself, ‘Put all of that aside.’ Like, you can’t change or cut this scene because you’ve had a mastectomy, or because [Brad Pitt and I are] married and people are going to analyze this or that. That would be cheating.”
She expected her reaction to ovarian cancer to be far worse, as she mentioned in an op-ed which she wrote in March this year in The New York Times. “I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes,” she wrote, noting the procedure would cause early menopause. “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.”
Now, over six months later, Jolie tells The Daily Telegraph, “I haven’t had a terrible reaction to it, so I’m very fortunate. I feel older, and I feel settled being older.”
This mom of six goes is content about her age: “I feel happy that I’ve grown up. I don’t want to be young again.”
Jolie’s decision was largely influenced by the long battle her mother, Marcheline Bertrand fought and ultimately succumbed to. During a recent interview with Tom Brokaw on Today, Jolie revealed that she even shared some of the same doctors and nurses, which her mother did.
“The doctor that did my ovary surgery was my mother’s doctor. And apparently my mother had said to her, ‘Promise me you will take Angie’s ovaries out,'” the actress said.
Speaking before about how her health issues have affected her relationship, she has said how, “[Brad] made it very, very clear to me that what he loved and what was a woman to him was somebody who was smart, and capable, and cared about her family, that it’s not about your physical body. So I knew through the surgeries that this wasn’t going to be something that made me feel like less of a woman, because my husband wouldn’t let that happen.”
Image Courtesy: Reuters
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