Carla Bruni’s battle with cancer: the treatment she has to take every day

In October 2023, Carla Bruni decided to open up on social media. Four years after being diagnosed with breast cancer , she wanted to talk about it. “I made a post because I thought it was practically impossible that at least one woman, seeing it, wouldn’t go for a mammogram, or at least have the reflex to make an appointment,” she explained on March 15th in Elsa Wolinski’s podcast, Allez j’ose! ( Go for it, I dare! ). Without the screening, the singer and wife of Nicolas Sarkozy would very likely have had to have her breast removed . “And not only that, ” she clarified. “ I would have had to undergo chemotherapy in addition to radiotherapy, hormone therapy, and surgery. And that’s no small thing. You lose all your hair, and it terrifies the whole family and even yourself.” Since her diagnosis, Carla Bruni still has to take a daily course of hormone therapy.

Carla Bruni must take a daily pill for “five or seven years”

“Hormone therapy is an oncological treatment generally used for hormone-dependent cancers ,” she explains. These types of hormone-sensitive cancers are often breast or prostate cancers. The body’s natural hormone secretion leads to tumor development. “So after a cancer like the one I had, hormone therapy is prescribed for about five to seven years. It’s a pill that you have to take every day,” the 56-year-old singer elaborates.

This story changed Carla Bruni’s perspective on her treatment

“I took it reluctantly for the first two years: it causes pain, makes you gain weight, puts you in a bad mood, makes your hair fall out—there are better options,” Carla Bruni confides. “But one day, a friend told me that his mother had relapsed with the same illness as me and that she wasn’t a candidate for surgery because she was very old. So they simply gave her hormone therapy, and in six months of treatment, her one-centimeter tumor had disappeared. […] I thought to myself, ‘I’ll take it every morning, happy.’ ”