Reality TV star Giuliana Rancic now faces a double mastectomy in her battle against breast cancer, but her quest to have a child is still possible, medical author Gina Shaw tells Newsmax Health.
Shaw, author of “Having Children After Cancer,” is a mother of three and herself a breast cancer survivor. “I absolutely understand why she is making this decision to remove both breasts,” says Shaw. “It may seem extreme to some people, but this will give her peace of mind rather than having to live with the uncertainty of the cancer returning.”
In an interview, Rancic said she hadn’t gotten “clean margins” when her breast tumor was removed.
This means there is an increased possibility the cancer would return because some malignant cells could have remained behind after the surgery, Shaw noted.
“If you haven’t gotten clean margins, you’re going to be terrified all the time. You’ll be wondering, ‘Is the cancer back? Is it back?’ And you won’t be able to rest,” Shaw said.
“If you’re going to become a parent, the last thing you want to do is bring a child into the world and not be there to raise that baby.”
Last October, Rancic, 37, revealed she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Desperate to start a family with her husband Bill, she had been undergoing IVF treatments. Giuliana is an anchor on E! News and her husband was the first-season winner of “The Apprentice.” They have publicly detailed her quest to become pregnant on their reality TV show “Guiliana and Bill.”
But Rancic announced Monday on the TODAY show that she had made the decision to undergo a double mastectomy – a move that she says makes it more likely that she’ll be able to have children.
“If I had chosen to just do another lumpectomy and then do radiation and then do anti-estrogen therapy, which means two to five years of medication, that basically puts me into early menopause, then I would have to put off having a baby for several years," Rancic said. “So that was something we took into account.
“But to be honest, at the end it all came down to just choosing to live and not looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life."
For the past two months, Shaw has watched with compassion as Rancic’s story unfolded. Shaw, at the age of 36, faced a similar dilemma when she was diagnosed with breast cancer just as she and her new husband were contemplating starting a family.
According to Shaw, while Rancic’s decision obviously means that she will not be able to breastfeed, a double mastectomy in itself does not interfere with fertility. However, if Rancic does need to undergo chemotherapy, which is often the case, this will delay her bid to become pregnant, because chemotherapy is a treatment that can be toxic to a developing baby.
While a woman often eventually begins menstruating within a year after treatment, doctors routinely caution a woman not to become pregnant for a few years after cancer treatment “because that’s the window where you want to make sure you don’t have a recurrence and have to think about resuming treatment,” Shaw noted.
Rancic has not said whether she will need chemotherapy.
In Shaw’s case, she and her husband were so certain that Shaw would be unable to bear children after cancer treatment that they adopted a daughter Annika. When Annika was 15 months old, Shaw became pregnant naturally and gave birth to her son, Adrian, and then, two years later, to another daughter.
“There definitely can be a happy ending for Giuliana,” Shaw said.
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