Surviving breast cancer

Special Report Breast Cancer

Victors Valiant
An actress. An athlete. A Supreme Court justice. They come from many walks of life, but breast cancer made them all simply victims. Happily, they shared the determination and good fortune to conquer their illness

Olivia Newton-John - Once she learned she had cancer, the singer acted quickly and never looked back

Olivia Newton-John didn't have second thoughts or seek second opinions. She had had several benign lumps in her breasts over the years, but when her doctor discovered a malignant tumor in her right breast in July 1992, he recommended swift action. "He wanted to re move all the tissue," she says. "I'd done a lot of reading; it seemed the best way." She agreed to a modified radical mastectomy and had a saline implant put in at the same time. "I've never regretted it," she says. "I can't wear anything too low because the implant isn't perfect. You look in the mirror and it's a reminder. But I'm here, and I'm lucky." While she approached surgery with confidence, Newton-John, 50, says she "freaked out" at the thought of chemotherapy: "I was afraid I would be allergic, that they would put the needle in me and I would die." Nor could she shake the image of her goddaughter Colette, the only child of her best friend, Nancy Chuda. Just over a year earlier, after undergoing chemotherapy, the 5-year-old had died of Wilms tumor, a rare children's cancer. "Olivia had seen Colette go through such agony," says Chuda, 51, a children's health advocate in Malibu. "She had to realize the process could be different for her." It took time, hat she did. To help fight the side effects - nausea and burning eyes she tried homeopathic remedies, herbs, acupuncture and praying with Chuda and Chuda's husband, Jim, both practicing Buddhists. "Spiritually I was very tuned in to everything," says Newton-John. Within about two years, with the love of her friends, her husband, Matt Lattanzi (divorced in 1996, they are still close), and their daughter Chloe Rose, now 12 (who they did not tell about the cancer until much later), she emerged from what she calls the initial shock and fog of her illness. Today the singer - who in May released Back with a Heart, her first album in the US, since her diagnosis-leads a life designed to keep her well: no smoking, no drinking and, most important, no stressing out, especially about cancer. "As far as I'm concerned, it's gone," she says. "That's the way I choose to see it and that's the right way for me."