Olivia Munn needed only one reason to document her challenging cancer battle: to show her 2-year-old son, Malcolm, that she "fought" for her life.
The actress, who shares her son with John Mulaney, spoke about her breast cancer diagnosis during a Good Morning America sitdown with anchor Michael Strahan recently. Around the 2-minute mark of the video below, Munn shared her biggest reason for documenting the journey via Instagram.
"Well, because if I didn’t make it, I wanted my son, when he got older, to know that I fought to be here. That I tried my best," Munn said. "You want the people in your life–you want the people that maybe don't understand what's going on right to know that you did everything you could to be here."
Earlier in the interview, Munn said that Malcolm was the first person she thought of upon hearing about her diagnosis. "I mean, honestly, I just thought of my baby," Munn said. "You know, cancer is the...that's the word you don't wanna hear. There's a lot of other things that you feel like you can beat. But you know, cancer takes down a lot of people. And I just thought about my baby."
Munn received her diagnosis last April, when the actress discovered that she had developed stage 1 aggressive Luminal B breast cancer in both breasts. 30 days after the diagnosis, Munn underwent a double mastectomy, followed by a hysterectomy and oophorectomy, in which her uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries were removed. Munn's latest treatment occurred last month, and throughout her health ordeal, it was Malcolm's presence that helped her further seek treatment.
"Whenever Malcolm would come into the home, he'd run straight to my bed because that's where he knows I am, like, that's what he associated with me," she said. "And that was just too difficult for me to take. I had to find out if there was another option. So I opted to do the hysterectomy with the oophorectomy. And almost immediately after that, my energy just came back full force."
In an Instagram carousel in March, where she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis, Munn wrote that she didn't feel like "there was time to cry."
“In the past ten months I have had four surgeries, so many days spent in bed I can’t even count and have learned more about cancer, cancer treatment and hormones than I ever could have imagined,” she explained in the camption. “Surprisingly, I’ve only cried twice. I guess I haven’t felt like there was time to cry. My focus narrowed and I tabled any emotions that I felt would interfere with my ability to stay clear-headed.”
