Olivia Munn delayed cancer treatment to freeze eggs before hysterectomy
43-year-old actress Olivia Munn decided to interrupt her cancer treatment and freeze her eggs. She told Vogue magazine that the consequence of treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer was premature menopause.
The star of the movie “X-Men: Apocalypse” learned that she had an aggressive form of breast cancer in April last year. So she hired a team of doctors and developed an intensive treatment plan that included four surgeries over ten months.
The second phase began in November 2023 and consisted of purposefully introducing her body into menopause. According to Olivia Munn, the treatment left her feeling completely devoid of energy and when her two-year-old son Malcolm was asked where his mother worked, he pointed to the bed: “It was so sweet. But at the same time it broke my heart because That’s exactly how he imagines me.”
An alternative treatment was removal of the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries. The operations were carried out last month. This meant that the star would no longer be able to bear and give birth to any more children, but the choice was between this opportunity and a full life - if she had not agreed to the operation, she would have spent her whole life in an exhausted state.
Before undergoing surgery to remove her reproductive organs, Olivia Munn decided to try retrieving her eggs. She says she has frozen her eggs three times in her life: at 33, 39 and most recently at 42, after learning she was diagnosed and that treatment would make it impossible for her to have children.
The doctor put her on a special protocol for retrieving her eggs—she couldn't pump herself full of hormones to try to induce increased ovulation, because even after a mastectomy, there was a risk that it would trigger the growth of cancer cells. Instead, Mann's treatment included lower doses of hormones: "At my age, every tenth egg is healthy, and we were hoping that this retrieval would produce one embryo."
But due to the cancer treatment protocol, doctors were only able to retrieve seven eggs - three fewer than planned. According to the actress, when the doctor called her and told her that she now had two healthy embryos, she burst into tears along with her partner, comedian John Mulaney. Now she plans to focus entirely on treatment.
The star hid her diagnosis from the public for almost a year - she spoke publicly about the treatment only in March of this year. She said that she did not want to show her pain to the public and went out only in those moments when she had the energy to do so. She recently appeared with John Mulaney at the Oscars, and before that she was spotted at several social events.