Breast Cancer: One Woman's Choice

April 2, 2007 — -- Rene Syler, former co-anchor on CBS' "The Early Show," was inspired by her family history of breast cancer to make a radical choice: to get a prophylactic double mastectomy.

In the final moments before the life-altering operation, Syler still had her doubts.

"Just a little bit of uncertainty," Syler said in a video diary for "The Oprah Winfrey Show." "I keep looking at that clock, like, you know, in an hour I'm, you know, gonna be without my breasts."

Syler seemed to have it all -- a dream job at CBS as an anchor and a picture-perfect family. But inside, Syler felt like she was living with a ticking bomb.

Both her mother and father had breast cancer, her father when she was a child. As an adult, Syler nursed her mother through the disease.

"My daughter Rene became my mother," Syler's mother Anne Syler said. "She researched everything. She researched the doctor, she researched the cancer, she researched the medicine."

Syler knew the genetic reality meant she could be next.

"I was witness to the annual biopsies that were just god awful in terms of the process she had to go through on a yearly basis to make sure she was still cancer-free," said Buff Parham, Syler's husband.

So last year, Syler made a difficult personal decision to have both breasts removed even though she did not have cancer.

In her new book, "Good Enough Mother," she wrote about that shocking choice.

"I reached the conclusion that such a drastic procedure was right for me after four years of worrying, coupled with multiple biopsies that left me disfigured and scarred," she writes in the book.

The difficult choice and terrifying time was made even worse when, just weeks before the surgery, Syler received an unexpected bombshell: She was let go from her job at CBS.

"Were there times we would talk and she'd say, 'This is hard?' Definitely," said Syler's sister Tracy Syler-Jones. "But I think Rene is a trooper. I think she is a fighter and I think she is a survivor."

Syler felt empowered by her decision, but an hour before the surgery, the inevitable fear became palpable.

Now, months after surgery, there's no more wondering and waiting if she will get breast cancer.