Angelina Jolie: Surgeon Says Mastectomy Announcement ‘Important For Her Soul’

Angelina Jolie’s surgeon, Dr Kristi Funk, from the Pink Lotus Center in Beverly Hills, spoke to Los Angeles magazine about the recent double mastectomy she performed on the star.

Dr Funk, spoke highly of Angelina and about her decision to have the necessary preventative surgery: “She is intensely private, but she calculated the moment when she would be ready to reveal something so personal.”

She spoke about Jolie, who has six children, touching on the timing factor of her decision to have the surgery, saying she “waited to find the perfect timing in her personal and professional life, but I think most importantly in her soul.”

Angelina Jolie wrote a heartfelt Op-ed in the New York Times in March sharing the news that doctors had found that she had a Faulty Gene called BRCA1. This gene gives her approximately an 87 percent risk of possible breast cancer.

She wrote in the piece: “My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.”

Angelina continued in that Op-ed piece to talk about how the procedure would reduce her chances of contracting breast or ovarian cancer:

“I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”

Angelina Jolie’s surgeon, Dr Funk, spoke more about the significance, especially for a woman as beautiful as Angelina, of having the double mastectomy:

“When someone who is arguably the most beautiful woman in the world removes the part of her body that is symbolic of femininity and sexuality, you have to say, ‘Why would she do that?'”