Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Mastectomy And Mastitis Diagnosis


Jaime Pressly opened up on Thursday about her mastectomy after she was diagnosed with mastitis, an inflammation of the mammary gland in the breast. Pressly explained during an appearance on The Talk that her health scare began after welcoming son Dezi with former fiance Eric Cubiche in 2007.

Pressly told the CBS co-hosts, “I had something that happened to me years ago — when I had my son I got mastitis, but I didn’t know because I thought it was just regular breastfeeding pain.”

She noted that she got mastitis, but didn’t know it because she has a high threshold for pain from being a dancer for 25 years. She noted, “I thought it was just regular” pain.

However, Pressly began to notice several lumps in her breasts about four years later, prompting her to visit the doctor. While there, the actress had scar tissue removed from one breast, but it eventually spread, forcing her to have tissue removed from the other breast as well. She revealed, “[I had] almost [a] full mastectomy.”

Mastitis is normally treated through antibiotics, but drastic cases require the removal of infected tissue. In Jaime Pressly’s case, her condition required it. Dr. Jennifer Ashton, a practicing OBGYN and senior medical contributor for ABC News, noted that a mastitis infection leading to a mastectomy is extremely rare.

Dr. Ashton noted, “While mastitis is painful, upsetting and potentially can lead to a systemic blood infection, it can usually be effectively treated and breastfeeding can continue.”

In Pressly’s case, that didn’t work. She told The View co-hosts, “I still have some breast tissue left, just from the mastitis because it mutated into something else because it sat dormant for a while.”

Understandably, the lumps in her breasts caused Jaime Pressly to wonder if she had cancer. While she had a mastectomy to remove the mastitis, the actress stated, “Thank God it wasn’t [cancer].”

The scary reason was apparently one of the factors that caused the actress to get a recent pixie cut. She told The View co-hosts, that she wanted “To make things easier” and “getting rid of all that extra” hair seemed to help. Pressly noted that Hollywood was another factor too. She stated of being typecast, “Nobody wanted me. No one wants you to play someone else.”

The actress is best-known for her role as Joy Turner in the sitcom My Name Is Earl. While the mastitis was a massive scare, the infection and resulting mastectomy didn’t keep Jaime Pressly down.

[Image: Celeb Mafia]

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