ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Dr. Oz sure was right about one thing: Angelina Jolie Pitt’s recent op-ed piece about her decision to remove her ovaries was powerful.
The actress, just 39, wrote eloquently about her decision to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed.
"Two years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy," she wrote in a New York Times essay published Tuesday. "A simple blood test had revealed that I carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene. It gave me an estimated 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. I lost my mother, grandmother and aunt to cancer."
And now she was back to follow up on the promise she made, to share information that could be useful, including this latest preventive surgery.
When I heard her say she wanted to see her children grow up and meet her grandchildren, it broke my heart. What mother hasn’t felt that way?
For most of my life, I was afraid I’d died of a massive heart attack like my mother and oldest sister.
My mother was 43 and my sister was 59.
It wasn’t until I was well into my 50s that I started to relax a bit. I’d managed to keep my weight within the normal range and although all of my siblings had been on high blood pressure meds for years, I had not.
Two years ago, it started to creep up. Last year, my doctor convinced me that I should take meds, too.
Tests have shown I have a little plaque but not enough to warrant surgery. I hope it never does.
My daughters are 24, 26. They’ve graduated college and are doing well. But like Jolie Pitt, I’d like to meet my grandchildren one day, too.
If there were a pill I could take or a surgery to undergo to swap out my genes, I’d do it in a heartbeat. For now, I’m doing my best to exercise and watch my diet, staying clear of the foods the Neanderthal in the house, my husband, eats even though his numbers are far better than mine.
Some 22,000 women are diagnosed each year with ovarian cancer in this country. About 15 percent of them have the BRCA 1 gene like Jolie Pitt but you're not likely to hear about them.
The actress’s announcement, widely dubbed the “Angelina effect,” spawned a surge in requests for genetic testing nationwide. BRCA testing rates, according to results of a review of a large U.S. health-insurance carrier, jumped nearly 40 percent in the month after her 2013 announcement and remained elevated for at least the following year.
She did, perhaps, what Meredith Sidewater of Sandy Springs may not have been able to do even though she made the same hard decision nearly five years earlier.
Five months after the removal of her breast in October 2008, Sidewater, 46, underwent a complete hysterectomy/oophorectomy. It was arthroscopic and the down time was only a few days.
“I was always more afraid of ovarian cancer than breast cancer because the survival rate is so much lower, and my aunt and great-grandmother died as a result of ovarian cancer,” she said in response to emailed questions. “However, I opted to have the mastectomy first because it was the most daunting of the surgeries and I wanted to get it over with.”
The way she saw it, if one has a BRCA mutation, it is a no-brainer to remove one's ovaries. Ovarian cancer is simply too deadly to sit idly by and "hope" that it doesn't come when the statistics of getting ovarian cancer are so high with a BRCA mutation.
Of the approximately 22,000 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, 14,000 die, according to the American Cancer Society.
Sidewater waited until after she had children to get tested because cancer struck her family members in their 50s and because she didn’t intend to remove her ovaries before then.
“It was an educated gamble I took,” she said. “However, in some cases, a woman may need to take earlier action.”
General counsel for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Sidewater could have ended her fight after completing the life-saving surgeries. She joined the board of Komen Atlanta because she believes in its critical mission to educate and assist underserved women to detect and survive breast cancer.
She shares her story for the same reason.
Less than 5 percent of women have the BRCA1 gene mutation like Jolie Pitt and Sidewater, said Dr. April Speed, a breast surgery oncologist. Those who do have a 50 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer in their lifetime.
“So you see why she felt like a ticking time bomb,” Speed said.
Speed said that before women take such drastic measures, they should talk to their doctor about getting genetic testing and to then follow that up with counseling.
“Regardless of results, genetic counseling is important,” she said.
Like Jolie Pitt, Sidewater hopes to see her son and daughter, each of whom has a 50 percent chance of having inherited the mutation, “grow up and up and up.”
I hope she does, too.
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