The Gossip Girl actress Elizabeth Hurley, who has a nine-year-old son, Damian, from a previous relationship, undergoes regular screening for the breast cancer which killed her grandmother, and while she normally thinks rationally about it, she admits she fears the worst whenever she has to await results from the tests. She said, “For 364 days of the year I can speak and think rationally about breast cancer, and for many of those days I’m actively fundraising actively or trying to raise awareness about the disease. But on day 365, I’m in a panic.”
She adds, “For on day 365, I get my annual mammogram and, in between the procedure and waiting for the nurse to come back with the result, I get really, really scared. In the 20 minutes or so that it takes for the doctor to study the images, my imagination takes me to dark and frightening places and I generally wind myself up into a frenzy. Everything bad flashes through my mind and invariably I end up seeing my little orphaned son crying at my funeral, his mother having lost her fight against breast cancer.”