Katie Thurston is opening up about her treatment options following her stage 3 breast cancer diagnosis.
The Bachelorette star, 34, shared on the Almost Famous podcast with Ben Higgins and Ashley Iaconetti on March 19 that she has been in discussions with her doctors about whether a mastectomy or lumpectomy is right for her, admitting that she’d been “weighing the options of maybe a double mastectomy.”
A mastectomy is a “surgery to remove all breast tissue from a breast” that is most often done to treat or prevent breast cancer, according to the Mayo Clinic. The breast skin and nipple may also be removed.
Thurston noted that her breast surgeon’s “preference” is a lumpectomy as it’s the “less invasive choice.” In a lumpectomy, a portion of the tissue from a breast is removed to help “ensure that all of the cancer is removed,” per the Mayo Clinic.
“… Especially at my age and my hopes to have a family and potentially even breastfeed, I think at the bare minimum, the left breast, which is not [cancerous] right now, it would be something I would hope to hang on to,” Thurston said.
“But again, I have to put my health first, so it’s kind of case by case in the coming months, what ends
up ultimately being the decision,” added Thurston, who also shared that her doctors told her she needs to undergo chemo to shrink her tumor before she has surgery.
Thurston went on to explain that her insurance “covers reconstruction” if she opted for the mastectomy route. “So you know, some women, I think also then go, ‘Yeah, if that, like it decreases the stress of reoccurrence and I get a boob job so be it,’ ” she shared.
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The reality star also revealed on the podcast that she has already begun the IVF process in order to help her ability to have children with her fiancé Jeff Arcuri in the future. She said she has undergone oncofertility, which she described as “IVF for people with cancer.”
“Because with chemotherapy, it does impact your reproductive system in a negative way. So you want to be proactive and at least have options in the event that you can’t conceive naturally in the future,” she explained.
“Now, some women have told me they had cancer, [and when they became] cancer free, they were able to conceive naturally, but we didn’t want to hold on to that. So we did go through the whole IVF process and ended up freezing our embryos. As of right now, we have successfully six fertilized embryos,” she shared.
Thurston initially announced her breast cancer diagnosis on Instagram on Feb. 15 alongside a pair of candid photos of herself with the caption, “Life update: I have breast cancer.”
She said she was diagnosed with cancer two weeks prior to the post, adding that she “experienced a range of emotions” after learning the news. “Despair. Anger. Sadness. Denial. And then strength,” she wrote. “Purposeful. Ready. I cried a lot. I tried to even make a video instead of this post and couldn’t.”
She said she wanted to share her story to help others going through the same thing. She concluded her message by saying that while the “first step of acceptance of my reality was the hardest,” she planned to “fight this.”
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