Linda Evangelista, the supermodel who rose to fame in the 1990s, revealed in an interview that she survived breast cancer twice in five years.
The fashion photographer described her diagnoses and multiple health issues in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Magazine published Tuesday.
Ms Evangelista, 58, said she was first diagnosed in 2018 after an annual mammogram. The magazine noted that it was the first time she had spoken publicly about her cancer.
Ms Evangelista did not immediately respond for comment on Tuesday.
In response to her diagnosis, she said, she chose to have a bilateral mastectomy, “assuming I was good and ready for life.” Breast cancer wouldn’t kill me.”
However, four years later, in 2022, she learned that the cancer had returned, this time in her pectoral muscle.
She remembered telling her surgeon, “Dig a hole in my chest.”
“I don’t want it to look pretty. I want you to dig. I want to see a hole in my chest when you’re done,” she’d told her doctors. “Do you understand me? I’m not going to die from this.”
After a second surgical procedure, Ms. Evangelista described her current prognosis as “good” in the interview, as told by her post-cancer oncologist.
However, she said her doctor gave her a “terrible oncotype score,” a number that reflects the risk of cancer recurrence.
Still, she said, the uncertainty has made her days more valuable.
“I know I have one foot in the grave, but I’m totally in party mode,” she said.
A breast cancer diagnosis has not been Ms. Evangelista’s only health problem in recent years.
Two years ago, she revealed in an Instagram post that the side effects of CoolSculpting, a “fat-freezing” procedure, had left her “permanently deformed” and “brutally disfigured,” as she had developed paradoxical fat hyperplasia, an effect in which Firm tissue masses develop in the treatment areas.
The condition, she said, caused her to become depressed and withdrawn after she “stopped looking like myself.”
She then sued Zeltiq Aesthetics, the company behind the proceedings, for $50 million and settled in July 2022 for an undisclosed amount.
Ms. Evangelista was one of the top five supermodels in the world in the 1990s, and she has continued to work and return to the limelight since her CoolSculpting procedures and side effects.
In 2022 she appeared on the cover of British Vogue, and from September 20 she will appear in a new Apple TV+ documentary, ‘The Super Models’. The project will reunite her with other ’90s supermodels, including Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford. In 1990, the four women famously appeared lip-syncing the lyrics in the George Michael video “Freedom 90.”
