In her new Netflix dark comedy called “Dead To Me,” Christina Applegate plays a brazen real estate agent Jen Harding. The character has something in common with Applegate– she’s had a double mastectomy.
Applegate Relates to Her ‘Dead to Me’ Character
“[Jen] having a mastectomy was something I brought to [creator and showrunner] Liz Feldman in the middle of filming,” Applegate tells the Hollywood Reporter. “Jen did not have cancer, she did it prophylactically, but the surgery itself and the aftermath of that is hard emotionally and physically. I wanted to be honest about it.”
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Applegate reveals that while staying upbeat may have helped her cope, she now wants to be more honest about the pain she went through during her cancer. “I was trying to be positive, and that was how I was dealing with it and surviving. But when I was just sitting there with myself, it’s an incredibly painful thing to go through. It’s an amputation of a part of you. It’s part of being a woman, and I wanted to be honest. So I brought it to Liz and she was like, ‘OK, let me see how we can weave this in.’ I think she did it beautifully.”
Screening for Breast Cancer
Applegate began getting mammogram screenings at age 30 because she has the BRCA gene mutation which dramatically increases a woman’s chance of getting breast cancer. She has a family history with the disease, likely related to inherited BRCA mutations, and in 2008, doctors caught her breast cancer early. After her diagnosis, Applegate had a double mastectomy. Her mom, also a breast cancer survivor, had a double mastectomy a few months later. At the time, Applegate told People magazine that she wanted to get her bilateral mastectomy so that she would be “done with the whole thing,” but that it was a difficult decision.
"I've seen [breast implants] on some girls recently where I'm like, 'Those are the best looking boobs I've seen'," Christina Applegate told Elle.com at the time. "So it can be a positive thing…You can get better boobs than you had before, if you so choose."
"You start to live with those boobs, and it's your reminder every day that this thing happened to you, unfortunately, and it's a part of your body that's changed drastically, and embracing that is difficult sometimes," she continued.
Prophylactic Measures Cancer Patients or High-Risk Patients Take
She also revealed in 2017 that she’s had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed as well so that she wouldn’t have any cancer scares. Ovarian and fallopian tube cancers are also linked to the BRCA 1 gene mutation.
Dr. Anne Partridge and Dr. Elizabeth Comen on when to think about a mastectomy
Why are so many women even established movie stars choosing to lose their breasts, sometimes prophylactically, even if there's no cancer present? Perhaps it's because a double mastectomy is the best option for removing cancer or diminishing cancer risk in women who are genetically predisposed to develop breast cancer.
RELATED: Christina Applegate Says She Grieved After Losing Her Breasts to Cancer
"When I talk to a woman who comes to me and she has breast cancer, I evaluate what the standard options for treatment for her are, which typically include cutting out the cancer," says Dr. Ann Partridge, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, "which is either a lumpectomy if you can get it all with just a little scooping around of the area that's abnormal or a mastectomy for some women meaning taking the full breast because sometimes these lesions can be very extensive in the breast.
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