Giuliana Rancic and breast cancer
E!’s Giuliana Rancic revealed Monday that she’s facing a new challenge in her journey to become a mother – She has been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer.
The 36-year-old host of ‘E! News’ and ‘Fashion Police,’ who’s been televising her efforts to get pregnant with her husband, Bill Rancic, on the Style Network’s ‘Giuliana and Bill,’ said on NBC’s ‘Today’ that a doctor insisted that she get a mammogram after two failed in-vitro fertilization treatments.
Rancic said she wasn’t planning to get a mammogram until she was 40, but the doctor wanted to rule out breast cancer because a pregnancy could accelerate the cancer.
Rancic said she’s going to have surgery this week and then receive radiation treatment for about 6 1/2 weeks.
After that, her doctors will try fertilization for a third time.
“I’m not going to give up” – Rancic said. “I want that baby. That baby will have saved my life.”
Giuliana Rancic.
It’s breast cancer awareness month, which is basically a positive thing, I think. But when a celebrity announces she has breast cancer this month, you can bet she’ll get lots of extra attention. Unfortunately, not all of what’s written is accurate – or even helpful.
The newest celebrity to announce her breast cancer is Giuliana Rancic – the star of her own reality show who made her name as an entertainment reporter. Rancic has been undergoing fertility treatments and turned to a new doctor who (unlike the other two she has seen) recommended a mammogram. That screening turned up the breast cancer.
I’ve written before about how much I admired former First Lady Betty Ford’s openness about breast cancer. When Ford announced she had the disease in 1974, it was revolutionary. Before then, the words ‘breast cancer’ were rarely spoken in public. Other celebrities followed Ford’s lead and before long, we had millions of women signing up for potentially life saving annual mammograms.
But now saying that you have breast cancer isn’t particularly radical. And instead of inspiring women to get the help they needed, these celebrity confessionals may actually create false impressions about disease. I wrote about one case in point a few weeks ago – the controversy over journalist Andrea Mitchell’s announcement that she had breast cancer. Some critics thought the phrasing of Mitchell’s statement might lead some women to believe that early detection can cure breast cancer. Sadly, that is not the case.
Now we have Rancic, who has said she is surprised that her other doctors didn’t recommend a mammogram. She shouldn’t be. Rancic is only 36, well below the age when major medical associations recommend annual screenings. We should all be glad that Rancic’s prognosis is good, but her story doesn’t really have any larger lessons for the rest of us – except that it’s always better to get medical information from an actual doctor rather than a reality show star.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSYW87DJezo
She put on a brave face to reveal her heartbreaking breast cancer diagnosis in front of the whole country on the Today show yesterday morning.
But Giuliana Rancic (36) has said that she was a ‘nervous wreck’ before going through with the revealing TV appearance.
In a segment for her own show E! News, the presenter’s husband Bill Rancic said her strength during the original interview was surprising, as earlier Giuliana hadn’t been able to utter the word ‘cancer’ without breaking down.
“I think she was a lot stronger than I thought, because up until this morning any time she even said the word cancer she would start crying” – Bill, 40, said.
“This morning was tough. Actually all weekend was really tough” – Giuliana said in a preview of the couple’s interview for E! News.
During her appearance on The Today Show, broadcast on the E! channel’s sister network NBC, Ann Curry notes that Rancic is shaking.
“I was going back and forth – should I do this, should I not do this?” Giuliana recalled. “It’s just so personal and I was like a nervous wreck.”
Despite her nerves, Giuliana and Bill say she was determined to go through with it in order to encourage other young women to be vigilant.
“I think her goal was to send a message to all the young girls out there and I don’t think it could have gone any better” – said Bill.
“I think our story has a happy ending. And that’s the good thing. It’s very treatable, it’s 100 percent treatable when you catch it early and that’s the main message I think. You’ve got to get after this thing sooner rather than later.”