Most of us would remember Linda Evangelista as being one of the most recognizeable faces of the 90s – alongside fellow supermodels like Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Christy Turlington. Known as ‘The Supers’, their faces were just about everywhere.
Over the past few years, Evangelista has opened up about the traumatic beauty procedure that left her permanently disfigured, and forced her to have to undergo liposuction surgeries to correct the problem. After the procedure, she effectively went into ‘hiding’ for six years.
The 58-year-old model, who hails from Canada, has spoken about this traumatizing experience, saying that she looked “unrecognizeable” after suffering a rare reaction to CoolSculpting, a procedure that freezes fat, per the Daily Mail.
Evangelista ended up filing a $50 million lawsuit against CoolSculpting’s parent company, Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc., claiming that she was unable to work following seven sessions of CoolSculpting between 2015 and 2016.
At the time she revealed the extent of her injuries, the model told People: “I loved being up on the catwalk. Now I dread running into someone I know. I can’t live like this anymore, in hiding and shame. I just couldn’t live in this pain any longer. I’m willing to finally speak.”
Now, Evangelista has sadly revealed that her health issues are far from over – admitting that she has battled two bouts of cancer since first being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal magazine, the mother-of-one – who shares a son with Salma Hayek’s now-husband, François-Henri Pinault – admitted that her prognosis is not as positive as she had hoped.
She told the outlet that she has a “horrible Oncotype score”, which is a number that determines the likelihood her cancer will return. “I know I have one foot in the grave, but I’m totally in celebration mode,” she said.
Evangelista mentioned her original bout of breast cancer in 2018, stating: “It was detected in my annual mammogram. The margins were not good, and due to other health factors, without hesitation, because I wanted to put everything behind me and not to have to deal with this, I opted for a bilateral mastectomy. Thinking I was good and set for life. Breast cancer was not going to kill me.”
However, in July last year, the model was faced with another health scare after discovering a lump on her chest. She recounted how she immediately got an MRI, before her oncologist and radiologist ordered a biopsy. As it turned out, her cancer had spread to her pectoral muscle.
“Dig a hole in my chest,” she recalled telling her doctor. “I don’t want it to look pretty. I want you to excavate. I want to see a hole in my chest when you’re done. Do you understand me? I’m not dying from this.”
She said that her life swiftly changed from being cancer-free to having to face chemotherapy and radiation, and that her hair has even grown back differently from the first time she lost it. “It came back very dark. It’s even curlier than it used to be. The first time, I lost all the hair on top of my head, like my grandfather did,” she said.
It’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear about Linda Evangelista’s battle with cancer, but we are sending our thoughts and prayers her way.
If you found this story interesting, you might like reading about Cindy Crawford’s daughter all grown up – at 19, she’s the spitting image of her mother.
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