Christina Applegate, who chose to have both of her breasts removed after one was found to contain cancerous lumps, will undergo breast reconstruction surgery over the next eight months.
"I didn't want to go back to the doctors every four months for testing and squishing and everything," she told Good Morning America in an interview that aired Tuesday. "I just wanted to kind of get rid of this whole thing for me," she said of the prophylactic double mastectomy. "This was the choice that I made and it was a tough one. My decision, after looking at all the treatment plans that were possibilities for me, the only one that seemed the most logical and the one that was going to work for me was to have a bilateral mastectomy," she explained.
Applegate, the 36-year-old star who will return to work on her ABC sitcom Samantha Who? in mid-September, is now "absolutely 100 percent clear and clean" of cancer and planning reconstructive surgery.
"I'm going to have cute boobs 'til I'm 90, so there's that," she joked. "I'll have the best boobs in the nursing home. I'll be the envy of all the ladies around the bridge table."
The decision was an emotional one.
"Sometimes, you know, I cry," she said. "And sometimes I scream. And I get really angry. And I get really upset, you know, into wallowing in self-pity sometimes. And I think that it's all part of the healing."
Applegate said she gained insight into the disease from her mom, Nancy Priddy, a repeat breast cancer survivor.
"She's been sort of this quiet warrior in the back and has been a great support, and just telling me that I was going to be OK," she said. "And I knew I was going to be OK. I've watched her. I've watched her have a mastectomy, and then I've watched her go through two years of chemotherapy and eight surgeries and a hysterectomy," Applegate added. "I've watched this woman survive both those things. So, for me, there was always that sense that I was going to be OK, no matter what."
The actress' cancer was discovered earlier this year during a follow-up exam.
"If this had been caught a year from now, or when I was 40, I probably wouldn't be able to live through this," Applegate said.
