Kayleigh McEnany reveals the horror of her cancer scare – and how a phonecall from Trump as she recovered from breast-removal surgery changed everything

As Kayleigh McEnany regained consciousness, blinking in pain and groggy from the anesthesia, the phone rang.

“Hello?” she called hoarsely.

The voice on the other end of the line surprised her.

It was Ivanka Trump, calling to offer her best wishes after Kayleigh underwent major surgery.

“It was within 24 hours of my procedure,” Kayleigh, 36, tells DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview. “I literally just woke up and was still in bed.”

A few days later, while she was recovering at home, her phone rang again.

This time it was Donald Trump himself, the then president. Kayleigh was shocked.

“I was overwhelmed,” she says, “I didn’t expect him to call.”

At the time, in May 2018, Kayleigh barely knew the president, despite working for his party as national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee.

But Trump made it clear he was thinking of her, telling her, “You’ve made such a bold decision. Melania and I are proud of you.”

The President’s call was not only an unexpected act of kindness, but also an acknowledgement of the anguish Kayleigh had just endured, culminating in the life-changing decision to have both breasts surgically removed.

Today, Kayleigh is a well-known face: she was a former White House spokesperson and now co-hosts the popular Fox News program Outnumbered.

But the story of her dramatic surgery began in 2009, when Kayleigh was just 20 and her mother, Leanne McEnany, discovered during a routine test that she had the infamous BRCA2 gene mutation.

This increased Leanne’s risk of breast cancer by 84 percent and ovarian cancer by 27 percent.

So she decided to have all her breast tissue removed, plus a hysterectomy to eliminate as many risks as possible.

If this was devastating news for Leanne, it was deeply upsetting for Kayleigh, who was told by doctors that there was a 50 percent chance that she also carried the gene. A few months later she went for a test and – on Christmas Eve – received the devastating confirmation.

“It was earth-shattering,” she recalls. “My doctor said to me, ‘You tested positive.’”

Kayleigh, who was staying with her parents over the holidays, burst into tears and ran downstairs to tell her family.

Her father took her in his arms and said, “Kayleigh, we all have a weakness in life, but now you know yours. So, tackle it head-on.”

At that moment she decided to follow her mother’s courageous example.

First, however, came an unexpected step. In preparation for the double mastectomy, Kayleigh underwent breast implant surgery so that when her breast tissue was later removed, she would not have to undergo immediate reconstructive surgery.

Kayleigh also had to think about what the surgery meant for her future.

“I wasn’t in a relationship at the time,” she says. “I didn’t have a steady boyfriend and I thought the surgery would be less traumatic if I had a life partner.”

So she put it off.

For the next ten years, she went to a specialized cancer center in Florida every six months for check-ups with mammograms or MRI.

As time went on, Kayleigh graduated from Georgetown University, studied at Oxford, and went to Harvard Law School. But her decade of deferment was punctuated by a series of what she describes as terrifying false alarms.

“I remember being in law school and feeling a lump and panicking,” she says. “During exam preparations I dropped everything and called my [doctor] for a mammogram. Fortunately, everything would turn out fine.’

But fear always hung over her head. In 2017, she met and married her husband, former baseball player Sean Gilmartin – which turned out to be a godsend.

And a year later, Kayleigh finally felt ready: she decided to go ahead with the double mastectomy.

“A big reason I had the confidence to make this decision was because I had a supportive husband,” she says. “He was my rock.”

Buoyed by her strong Christian faith, Kayleigh found the strength to go through with the surgery – and she’s so glad she did.

If Kayleigh had feared she was “losing a piece of myself,” her worries disappeared when doctors removed her bandages. In fact, she says, she was surprised.

Kayleigh had opted for nipple-sparing surgery and that, together with the implants she had placed ten years earlier, meant that her original breasts looked almost exactly the same.

“I turned to my mother and asked, ‘Did they even do the surgery?’ I still looked like myself,” she recalls. “The approach I had taken left me feeling strong, confident, and almost unchanged.

“I felt no pain during the night in the hospital. The only discomfort I felt during my recovery was the tension of the surgical drains hanging from small sheaths on my sides, which collected excess blood.”

Afterwards she realized that she didn’t have to be afraid of ‘losing’ her breasts.

There is a prejudice that [a mastectomy means] “They’re being chopped off,” she muses. “I hate hearing that now. I get angry when I hear that, because that’s not the case. It doesn’t have to be so emotional. It scares a lot of women when a mastectomy is described like that.”

Kayleigh’s desire to educate other women about the BRCA genes and the cancer prevention methods now available led her to speak at the Republican National Convention in August 2020, just over two years after her surgery.

She had since been promoted to White House press secretary — after working for a time on Trump’s re-election campaign — and had moved to Washington from her parents’ home in Florida.

The morning of her RNC speech, she received another call from Trump — this time wishing her luck.

“Everyone is excited about your speech,” he told her. “Give it emotional and powerful. This message is important.”

Looking back on that moment, Kayleigh says, “President Trump will never know how much that phone call meant.”

Kayleigh took the stage and told a national audience of 17.3 million people about what had happened to her and the support she received from the Trump family immediately after the event.

“I was scared,” she told the audience. “The night before, I was holding back tears because I was preparing myself to lose a piece of myself.”

‘[But] “Here was the leader of the free world who cared about me,” she said.

Kayleigh tells the Mail she has never regretted it again and now feels a huge sense of relief.

She takes a deep breath and says, “I don’t have to worry anymore. I’m worry-free now. My risk of breast cancer has gone from 84 percent to almost 0 percent.”

And while she is still at increased risk for ovarian cancer, she knows she can choose a hysterectomy at the right time.

Now a mother of two young children, she wants to encourage other women to discuss their options with their doctor.

“We need to be more open with each other — and with our stories about how the threat of breast cancer affects us emotionally, psychologically, and physically,” she says. “That’s important.”