One sacrifice by Angelina ...a giant leap for all women
AS YOU might remember, Reader’s Digest (my paternal grandparents, Exmoor hill farmers, were keen subscribers) used to have a regular medical feature, in which a different part of the body explained its purpose in layman’s language.
It is to this series of articles – who could ever forget the excitement of turning to an illustrated page titled ‘I am Joe’s heart’ or ‘I am Jane’s breast’ – that I owe almost all my knowledge of the human body.
When I was growing up, we didn’t have the internet, where detailed, up-to-date information about sickness, health and modern medicine is available in a few clicks. Nor did we have Angelina Jolie, who has arguably done more in the cause of female reproductive health than any woman since Marie Stopes.
In 2013, Jolie had a very public preventative double mastectomy, an operation that led to a syndrome called the Angelina Effect and a 40 per cent rise in the number of women in the US seeking early checks. Then, last week, she revealed she’s had further surgery to remove her ovaries and Fallopian tubes – and two organs the size of walnuts were briefly one of biggest news stories in the world.
The 39-year-old actress was lucidity and honesty itself as she spoke of her surgery in words that will give comfort and inspiration to millions of women, but also raised unsettling questions.
SHOULD we go and have tests to see what might go wrong with us, at some distant point in the future, and then take precautions as potentially radical and invasive as Jolie? Is this the new normal? If it is, how on earth will the National Health Service, and or even the private medical system, cope?
After the revelations, there were mutterings of disquiet: Jolie was boosting the $1.7 trillion cancer industry, said some; others sniffed she was lucky to have the means to pay for surgery that costs about £4,700 (a procedure not always covered by private medical insurance). Katie Hopkins, professional Twitter troll, tweeted: ‘Angelina Jolie. Smug doesn’t cover it. Curating her organs to maximise life expectancy. What’s next fag ash lil? Your lungs?’
My mother has Parkinson’s disease, and so do two of her siblings, which means that it’s more than likely genetic. I could have a test, and so could my brothers. So far, we’ve chosen not to, following the precept of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who said: ‘Does aught befall you? It is well; all that befalls was part of the great web.’ I can’t see how knowing could be of any help. But having read her piece, I understand better what Jolie did and why she did it. Twelve per cent of us will contract breast cancer, but with her mutation in the BRCA1 gene, Jolie’s risk of the disease was 87 per cent. So no breasts and no ovaries was, for her, a no-brainer. I applaud Jolie for writing (in a piece I mentally christened ‘I am Angelina’s ovaries’) that she feels no less feminine for having placed a full stop on her own fertility. By saying this, she has done all women a service, including baby girls as yet unborn. She has sacrificed her luscious and nubile moviestar image so others might live, and turned her own health crisis into a ‘teachable moment’ for the whole world.
INSTEAD of sticking her head in the sand, as you and I might, she has done all she can to gain what doctors call a ‘positive health outcome’ for herself, and en route has become an ambassador for women’s health and a living advertisement for the menopause, a condition considered so unspeakable that we still coyly call it ‘the change’ or ‘the M-word’.
As someone commented beneath her article online: ‘A beautiful person inside and out.’
I know readers will join with me in wishing Mrs Jolie-Pitt, mother of six, very well on what Oprah would call her ‘journey’.
WHATEVER the motivation for David Cameron’s declaration regarding his third term, he should have ducked the question. It’s a schoolboy error to tell anyone what you’re doing, even if you can get a decent soundbite out of it later (‘two terms, ten years, one kitchen’, he roared at his last PMQs). In my experience, the moment you tell someone what you’re up to they’re already bored. Nobody thought for a second that the PM was in it for 15 long years in Downing Street, but no leader should ever admit that tomorrow doesn’t belong to him.
AS former Tory MP Steve Norris has pointed out, Zac Goldsmith, the super-rich Richmond MP, could be sitting on a beach stuffing coke up his nose, but instead he works his socks off and is about the only Tory left who tries to keep ‘green crap’ (copyright most Tories) on the agenda. ‘I love Zac in a bromance kind of way,’ says Norris. RT that! I once described him as having a countenance carved by angels out of caramel, but he’s not just a pretty face. It’s time the Government got serious about the environment again and climate change, and even though I am aware any endorsement from me is the kiss of death, Zac deserves a bigger stage.