Christina Applegate was "disgusted" by herself for describing her double mastectomy as a "blessing".
The 54-year-old star was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer in 2008 at the age of 36, after a routine MRI revealed she carried the BRCA1 mutation - which increases the risk of having the disease - and she underwent a double mastectomy, later being confirmed as cancer free.
In her new memoir You With The Sad Eyes, Christina opened up on her reaction to her health struggles, the decision to go public, and how she tried to raise awareness of early detection while helping high risk women afford screenings.
As quoted by the New York Post, she wrote: “It was my way of coping with how brokenhearted I was to lose my breasts.
“To this day, I feel emotionally and physically mangled by what I went through, but the organisation mitigates the terrible loss I felt and feel.
"But there are other ways I know I hurt instead of helped, both others and myself."
Christina was "disgusted by what came out of [her] mouth", particularly during an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show just one month after her surgery.
She recalled: “It should have been a moment to share the truth... I thought I should tell everyone that it was a blessing.”
She had been told the same thing from fellow breast cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge, who told her that "this is a blessing that’s happened to you in your life" and a chance to "start over, to change everything".
Christina reflected: “Here’s how I feel about that interview now. It was bulls***.”
She continued: “I had lied, thinking I was being uplifting. I was acting like Little Ms. Warrior, but that’s not how I really felt.”
Rather than helping people, she feels like she actually hurt the women going through such a traumatic experience.
She added: “There I was, talking about f****** blessings when they were going through a living hell.
“I was setting up a paragon that no one going through cancer could ever rightly live up to.”
Elsewhere in the interview, she joked about how plastic surgeons "can make some very pretty boobies" as the technology had improved a lot since her mother's own battle with cancer.
However, now she has admitted she felt "alone and sad" as she mourned "something that is the most intimate and devastating of amputations"
She said: "No amount of plastic surgery can ever make up for it."
In June 2021, Christina was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and she made sure this time round she was "not going to lie" about the impact of the illness.
She noted that "MS sucks", while criticising her own media tour back in 2008.
She wrote: “It’s not like you can get rid of the cancer, get breast reconstruction and move on, which was certainly how I described my journey to Oprah, Robin and others...
“We need to stop ramming blessings down the throats of people in distress. That’s not how we help people. We help people by radical, thoughtful honesty.”
