Rita Wilson

Because I wonder how much your friends helped you through that period of your life.

You were diagnosed in 2015.

Yes.

And you had a bilateral mastectomy.

Correct.

And as I mentioned earlier, you wrote this extraordinary piece, magazine piece, about... The thing that really struck me about it was you were tackling the idea that so many women are guilted into feeling that their stress might have caused their illness.

Right, right.

And I thought that was very powerful.

But could you talk to us about that part of your life and how important your friends were through that?

Well, I want to address that part because I think that so many times you'll hear women say, I brought this on myself.

Stress brought this on and that's why I got sick.

And I really...

I really felt that I wanted to understand that.

And so I called a doctor at Stanford University and I said, is there a connection at all between stress and breast cancer?

And he had done a study on that and he said, there is not.

And also my doctor told me that too, that there is no connection.

He said there's a connection between stress and if you're going through chemotherapy and any kind of treatment that they found that the more relaxed you are, if you did meditation, if you did something like that, that the chemo, it was a bit easier to go through chemo.

But when I asked him why this happened, why do women say, I brought this on?

Why do they take responsibility for it?

He said such a fascinating thing.