Olivia Munn’s son was the reason she documented her brutal breast cancer fight.
Olivia Munn’s son was the reason she documented her brutal breast cancer fight
The ‘Newsroom’ actress, 43, was diagnosed with bilateral breast cancer in April 2023 and shared her diagnosis on social media a year later, revealing in March she had a double mastectomy after an MRI found a fast-moving, aggressive form of the disease in both her breasts.
She has now told ‘Good Morning America’: “Cancer is the… that’s the word you don’t want to hear.
“There’s a lot of other things that you feel like you can beat, but you know cancer takes down a lot of people. And I just thought about my baby.”
Olivia was referring to her two-year-old son Malcolm who she shares with her 41-year-old comedian partner John Mulaney.
She added about why she wanted to “document” her cancer journey: “Well, because if I didn’t make it, I wanted my son when he got older to know that I fought to be here. That I tried my best.
“You want the people in your life… you want the people that maybe don’t understand what’s going on right to know that you did everything you could to be here.”
Olivia also told how part of the treatment for her ‘luminal B’ cancer was to suppress the production of hormones that causes it to grow, leading to her being put in a medically induced menopause that prevented her from spending time with her boy.
She added: “The hormone suppression therapy is brutal and it gave me next level debilitating exhaustion.
“I was just in bed all day long, all day long, and my quality of life was so minimal and I wasn’t able to be there for my baby.
“Whenever Malcolm would come into the home he’d run straight to my bed because that’s where he knows I am, like that’s what he associated with me.
“And that was just too difficult for me to take. I had to find out if there was another option.”
Olivia decided to get a hysterectomy and ovariectomy but wanted to do an egg retrieval before the surgeries so that she and John could still have the option to have more children.
She added: “John and I had a long talk about it. We realized that we weren’t done growing our family.
“That’s a scary process because I have a cancer that feeds off of hormones so I knew there was a risk and our doctor said, ‘Look, we’re gonna get one for you and then we’re gonna call it.’
“And then our doctor called and he said, ‘Hey we got the results back. It’s two healthy embryos, and I… I mean we just started bawling, crying, both of us.”
Olivia underwent four surgeries in 10 months amid her cancer journey, which she said was made “terrifying” by also being a mum.
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