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Entertainment
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Health
Breast Cancer
Giuliana Rancic returned to E! News (and Twitter!) less than one week after her breast cancer surgery -- so it's easy to forget that she's still recovering.
"I'm hanging in there," Rancic, 37, tells Parade. "I have good days and bad days, but so far so good. I'm very optimistic and I'm just happy to have caught it early."
Rancic was unexpectedly diagnosed with the early stages of breast cancer in October, when a fertility doctor required her to get a routine mammogram. A few days later, she went onto the Today show to reveal the news, in hopes of encouraging other women to get mammograms. Though she has said she was a "nervous wreck" about making the announcement, she now believes that the support she received -- both from famous friends and E! viewers -- helped her to recover more quickly.
"I really relied on a lot of those messages I was receiving through Twitter and email and through blogs right before the surgery and the week I was recovering," she admits. "I know it sounds so cliché, but I think it helped me recover quicker and it got me in better spirits. The word I kept seeing over and over again was 'strong.' 'Be strong, you're strong.' That word has never meant so much to me as it has this past month. I owe that all to the people behind me."
Her main supporter, though, has been husband Bill Rancic, who kept Giuliana's well-wishers posted before and after the surgery. Both Giuliana and Bill are used to sharing their private life with the public -- via their reality series named, appropriately, Giuliana and Bill -- but this experience had them opening up in a whole new way. Does the talk show host have any regrets about letting people in? Absolutely not, she says.
"We just felt like with every trial and tribulation we've put on this show, people have told us how much they learned from it and how it made them feel less alone," reveals Giuliana. "We really are like open books. It's worth it to kind of sacrifice some of my personal life to help others."
That's why Rancic keeps repeating her message of early detection, stressing that women should get mammograms no matter how young they are -- because it could make all the difference in the world.
"Early detection means so much," she tells Parade. "I want women to make sure they're taking care of their health and being proactive."
