Sharon Osbourne has revealed that she underwent a double mastectomy after discovering she carried a gene that increases the risk of breast cancer.
“As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought: ‘The odds are not in my favor’. I’ve had cancer before and I didn’t want to live under that cloud: I decided to just take everything off, and had a double mastectomy,” the “America’s Got Talent” judge told Hello! Magazine in an interview.
Osbourne battled colon cancer ten years ago. Her son Jack, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, recently welcomed his first daughter Pearl.
“For me, it wasn’t a big decision, it was a no-brainer,” said the wife of Black Sabbath rocker Ozzy Osbourne about her decision to undergo the surgery. “I didn’t want to live the rest of my life with that shadow hanging over me. I want to be around for a long time and be a grandmother to Pearl.”
The 60-year-old added, “It’s not ‘pity me,’ it’s a decision that I made that’s got rid of a weight that I was carrying around.”
Prior to the mastectomy, Osbourne also had surgery to remove her breast implants that had leaked into her stomach wall. She told the magazine that she regrets the implants, saying that it’s “like having a waterbed on your chest.”
She has vowed to not have future cosmetic surgery ever again: “Sometimes I’ll see a photo and I’ll think, ‘My face looks plastic; it can look so unnatural from certain angles. Now I am definitely, definitely done. You can’t buy your youth back, no matter how much money you’ve got. I won’t be going under the knife again.”