Sharon Osbourne is a cancer survivor, and she plans to keep it that way. More than a decade after getting through a colon cancer scare, Osbourne found out the frightening news that she is carrying the gene that predisposes her to breast cancer -- so she decided to have a double mastectomy.
"As soon as I found out I had the breast cancer gene, I thought: 'The odds are not in my favor,' " The Talk cohost told the U.K.'s Hello! magazine. Osbourne, who recently turned 60, added that she didn't want to live under the grim spectre of cancer.
"I decided to just take everything off," she said. Osbourne underwent the 13-hour operation to remove both breasts last summer, a family rep confirms to People.
The upbeat matriarch of the Osbourne family had no qualms about making the difficult decision to have the prophylactic procedure.
"For me, it wasn't a big decision," she says. "I want to be around for a long time and be a grandmother to Pearl" -- the 6-month-old baby daughter of Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne's son, Jack, and his new bride Lisa Stelly (the brand-new parents married in Hawaii on Oct. 7).
"It's not 'pity me,'" explains Sharon. "It's a decision I made that's got rid of this weight that I was carrying around."
