Two months after opening up about her battle with breast cancer, actress Olivia Munn is sharing even more about her journey.
“Privately people are battling things that you would never know,” Olivia told Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan after battling cancer for 10 months, privately.
As Olivia shared in a lengthy Instagram post back in March, her breast cancer diagnosis came as a shock. As she explained in the post and in her interview with Strahan, just months before being diagnosed with cancer her yearly mammogram and ultrasound were clear.
And the genetic testing she underwent with her sister all came back normal.
Munn admits she never would have known she had breast cancer if it wasn’t for her OBGYN, Dr. Thaïs Aliabadi, who made the decision to “calculate my Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Score.”
Her score of 37.3% put Munn in the high risk category and she was instructed to get an MRI. It was the results of that MRI that revealed she had cancer.
“I just thought of my baby,” Munn said referring to her young son Malcolm who she shares with partner comedian John Mulaney. “You know, cancer; that’s the word you don’t want to hear.”
Munn’s specific diagnosis was stage 1 aggressive Luminal B breast cancer in both breasts. Her team of doctors told her that if she was “extremely aggressive” with her treatment she “could fight this and win.”
“But at the same time, once they started finding all of these little spots in my breast, like ‘Oh, there’s another tumor, there’s another tumor.’ There was such an urgency to it because we had to get in and make some really big decisions.”
Thirty days after receiving her diagnosis, Munn underwent a double mastectomy.
Despite going through the battle privately, Munn admitted she initially made the decision to documented her cancer battle for her son.
“Because if I didn’t make it, I wanted my son when he got older to know that I fought to be here. That I tried my best,” she explained. “You want the people in your life, you want that people that maybe don’t understand what is going on right now to know that you did everything you could to be here.”
The hormone suppression therapy Munn underwent put her into medically-included menopause, GMA reports. As a result, Munn also underwent an egg retrieval prior, in order to have the option to grow her and John’s family.
The decision to do so was a gamble as the type of cancer Munn was battling fed off of hormones.
“I’m not going to ask for too much more in this life, I promise. I just want one more baby.”
The egg retrieval was successful, Munn shared. They now have two healthy embryos.
“The hormone suppression therapy was brutal,” she explained, leaving her so exhausted she barely had any quality of life. As a result, she opted for a full hysterectomy and ovariectomy instead of continuing with hormone suppression therapy.
Now, Munn is preparing to continue her treatment with a drug designed to “stop her body from producing cancer growing hormones elsewhere in the body.”
The actress admitted that while she knows she will continue to be aggressive in her fight, she spoke candidly about how exhausting it has all become. “These drugs are so tiring. […] It feels non stop because it is non stop.”
In the end, Munn said she learned she’s “a lot braver than I thought I was.” She adds that “the most important thing in my life is my family. Everything else can go away.”
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