You wrote:
“That’s very easy to say, but appropriate action when it comes to cancer doesn’t always work, does it?”
Nope.
“Jolie had a high likelihood of developing breast or ovarian cancer. I don’t laud her as “brave”; IMO it was a personal decision involving self-preservation more than bravery. But I understand why she did it.”
I understand why she did it too. I just don’t think it makes much sense to hack off perfectly healthy body parts in an age where cancer is increasingly beatable anyway.
Not ovarian cancer, which is one of the types she was likely to develop.
Angelina Jolie’s body parts were not perfectly normal and healthy. She has the BRCA gene mutation. She was walking around with a couple of time bombs. Now she has peace of mind.
Both my parents and a sister died of lung cancer. They all smoked. I've never smoked, but I'm not naive enough to think that I couldn't develop lung cancer. My mother and father's lung cancers were untreatable. My sister, who had stopped smoking five years before, was diagnosed with small cell, limited stage lung cancer (lung and lympth node) in February 2010. She underwent approximately 50 radiation treatments and multiple chemo treatments. The doctor told her that small cell cancer is the most aggressive, but it also responds to treatment. Would it come back? Yes he said...with a vengeance. One of the nurses working the chemo therapy unit told us that cancer has become a chronic disease: you're diagnosed, are given treatments, it goes into remission, it comes back...and the cycle replays itself.
In August of 2010, my sister underwent 10 radiation treatments of the brain to help keep the cancer from spreading there. In June of 2011, they discovered the cancer had gone to her brain. She entered hospice care on July 1st, and died Sept. 2, 2011 on her 69th birthday.
Despite the advances in cancer treatment, it's still more likely to be terminal, than beatable.