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In a new documentar y, the celeb chef gets real about t her breast-cancer battle and double mastectomy
AT the opening of Sandra Lee’s new documentary, she confronts her harsh, new reality. “You actually have breast cancer,” the 52year-old tells herself, sounding incredulous. “Cancer. That word will put the fear of God in you like you’ve never felt before.”
In “RX: Early Detection — A Cancer Journey With Sandra Lee,” premiering Monday on HBO, the “Semi-Homemade” chef brings the viewer deep inside her harrowing journey.
Lee, the de facto first lady of New York, was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in 2015, following a routine mammogram. That’s when she decided to have a camera chronicle her experience, including a double mastectomy, and the immediate aftermath.
The result is a low-production, high-impact ad for early breast-cancer screening.
Lee lets the filmmakers show her at her most vulnerable moments as she searches for doctors, seeks out the most effective treatments and questions experts about why the vicious disease chose her, someone whose family history wouldn’t seem to predispose her to breast cancer. (Although her great- grandmother did have breast cancer.)
At one point, she expresses eagerness to get rid of her breasts and mitigate the chance of the cancer spreading. After all, she felt lucky her doctors caught it when they did.
“If you’re not in the right place at the right time and you don’t catch it, it’s the scariest disease,” she says.
It also may be among the least glamorous. This documentary forgoes any attempt to pretty up the stripped-down, clinical reality of doctors’ offices and hospital rooms.
Some of the most shocking scenes follow Lee’s painstaking decision to have a double mastectomy. The cameras follow her into the operating room, and continue to run even as doctors remove Lee’s breast tissue.
“They found more cancer when they were in there . . . so I did the right thing in taking everything out,” she says.
The film also offers a glimpse into her decade-long relationship with Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
In the operating room, he announces to the doctors and nurses, “I’m Andrew. I’m in charge of moral support.” He then tells Lee how much he loves her.
There are lighter moments too. On the day of her surgery, Lee and Cuomo argue over lasa-gna — a controversy dating back to 2010, when Cuomo’s mom, Matilda, trashed Lee’s recipe.
“Let’s not raise the lasagna conversation,” he says to the camera. Lee recounts how her sister Kimber brought a dish of lasagna that he called “meat casserole.”
“It was not a lasagna,” he insists, adding, “Nice. But different.”
Lee’s own story comes full circle when, a few months after her surgery, she makes her first appearance at the 2015 Emmys in a blush ballgown with a plunging neckline. (She has since had reconstructive surgery.)
“I bought this dress three years ago in London, and I could never fit into it because I had too big of boobs,” she says. “Now that I don’t have a top, I can wear my dress.”
That month she declared herself cancerfree on “Good Morning America.”
“Early detection,” she says, “is everything.”