Allyn Rose will participate tomorrow night in the Miss America pageant. Win or lose, however, the Miss DC has a far more important agenda to take care of following the event: she is scheduled to undergo a double mastectomy. The 24-year old is doing so as a preventive measure to reduce her odds of developing the disease that took her mother, grandmother and great aunt. “My mom would have given up every part of her body to be here for me, to watch me in the pageant,” Rose said Wednesday. “If there’s something that I can do to be proactive, it might hurt my body, it might hurt my physical beauty, but I’m going to be alive.” The University of Maryland student plans to show off her roller skating talents during the annual event and then heed the advice of her father, who broached this idea two years after his wife passed. Rose’s mother was first diagnosed with cancer at the age of 27 and Allyn – who does NOT carry the “breast cancer genes” BRCA1 and BRCA2 – says she doesn’t want to wait to find out if she’ll follow tragic suit. If she wins tomorrow, she hopes to serve as a role model. “I’ve been thinking how powerful that might be to have a Miss America say, ‘I might be Miss America but I’m still going to have surgery. I’m going to take control of my own life, my own health care.’ So I guess it’s up to what happens on Saturday night.”
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Allyn Rose, Miss America Hopeful, Speaks on Planned Double Mastectomy
