There are strenuous years behind Linda Evangelista: the former supermodel suffered from breast cancer twice and had one perform bilateral mastectomy. To raise awareness of the disease, Evangelista is now sharing her ordeal with the world.
At the beginning of September, Linda Evangelista, 58, revealed in an interview with the “Wall Street Journal”, having been diagnosed with breast cancer twice in the past five years. “It was discovered on my annual mammogram. The margins didn’t look good and due to other health factors, I had no hesitation in having a bilateral mastectomy [vollständige Entfernung der Brustdrüse, Anmerkung der Redaktion]decided because I wanted to leave everything behind me and not have to deal with it,” said the former supermodel. In an interview with “The Sun”, the 58-year-old now goes into further detail.
Linda Evangelista didn’t want breast cancer to kill me
Linda remembers the moment she discovered a lump during a routine mammogram: “Every time you go, you think, ‘Are they going to find something now?’ And then it was like, ‘We think we see something, we want to take more pictures.’ The room starts spinning. But they said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s still early,'” Evangelista said. Then she decided to have a mastectomy. “Because of my lung problems and the radiation, I said, ‘I’m going to be so radical.’ Because I didn’t want breast cancer to kill me and I thought I could get it under control,” the model said in the interview, which took place last week in advance of October Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
“At that moment I felt the bump”
“I was happy with my decision and thought that I was set for life. I wouldn’t die of breast cancer,” reveals Linda Evangelista, but her fight was far from over. She discovered another knot when she received a call that her son Augustin, 17, had disappeared during a school trip. In a panic, she pressed her hand to her chest to cope with the stress and felt the irregularity.
“I had heart palpitations and I rubbed my chest and said, ‘Calm down, calm down’. That’s when I felt the bump. It was a bump and I wasn’t sure, so I pressed on it,” Evengelista said in the Interview in New York and adds: “I asked myself, ‘Is this where my rib was removed? I had a rib removed in one of my many, many, many lung surgeries. I’ve had lung surgeries and other surgeries throughout my career , which I kept secret. After all, work was my escape from my life and my reality, because for me it was just fun and fantasy.”
Salma Hayek took care of the ex-supermodel
Then came the news she’d been dreading all along: “They said, ‘You have cancer again. And it’s muscle cancer.’ I’d never heard of that.” Chemotherapy followed, during which Linda felt “half dead” and didn’t want to celebrate Thanksgiving. Then Salma Hayek, 57, flew to New York to take care of her and her favorite food. The actress is married to Linda’s ex, businessman Francois-Henri Pinault, 61, and is Augustin’s stepmother.
“Salma called and I said, ‘We’re not having Thanksgiving this year.’ I was half dead. I couldn’t. There was no way I could do it. And she said, ‘Yes, you’re coming. I’ll be there.'” ; remembers the ex-supermodel. “I said, ‘Please, please don’t. Please don’t’. And she said, ‘No, no, no, it’s important’ – and presto, there she was. She was cooking. I said, ‘I want your Mexican chicken’ , and she put on a whole party all by herself. I don’t know how she found her way around my kitchen so quickly. She did a great job.”
The actress was one of the “Handful of people” who knew about Evangelista’s illness. The model wanted to avoid media attention at all costs during this time.
Sources used: thesun.co.uk, wsj.com