When Angelina Jolie announced Tuesday in a New York Times Op-Ed, that she had a proactive double mastectomy after discovering she carried the BRCA1 gene, a La Mesa woman immediately knew she had a special kinship with the Hollywood actress.
More than 10 years ago, Holly Weber made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy after testing positive for the BRCA1 gene. The genetic mutation increases the likelihood of getting breast cancer in the future.
In an interview with 10News, Weber said that her proactive decision when she was 31 was done based on her own personal experiences. Weber’s maternal grandmother died of breast cancer at age 55. Weber’s mother, got the disease at 47.
Given those factors, she admits that the decision was easier than one might think.
"I recognize it may not be that easy for some, but it just was for me," she said in the interview.
Unlike Jolie, however, Weber’s surgery more than 10 years ago was still a relatively new procedure, and fraught with uncertainty.
"(There was) not a person I could look to and say, 'Hey, have you done this?'" she said. "I'd even asked my doctors who were performing the surgeries if they could refer me to previous patients and I was their first."
Though it was risky it was a risky and emotional decision, Weber knows she made the right one – for her.
"I opted to not live a life of anxiety or fear and my thought was that I feared cancer and chemo more that I did this surgery," Weber told 10News.
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