As Kayleigh McEnany regained consciousness, blinking awake and feeling groggy from the anesthesia, the phone rang.
“Hello?” he asked in a gruff voice.
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 had literally just woken up and was still in bed.”
A few days later, as he continued his recovery at home, his phone rang again.
This time it was Donald Trump himself, the then president. Kayleigh was in shock.
Kayleigh McEnany decided to undergo a double mastectomy in May 2018 after discovering that she, like her mother, had the BRCA2 gene that increases the risk of developing breast cancer.
Donald Trump was very supportive of McEnany throughout the process.
“I was shocked,” she says. “I didn’t expect him to call me.”
Back then, in May 2018, despite working for her party – as a national spokesperson for the Republican National Committee – Kayleigh barely knew the president.
But Trump clearly wanted her to know he was thinking of her, telling her: “You made a very bold decision. Melania and I are proud of you.”
The President’s call was not just an act of unexpected kindness, but an acknowledgement of the decade of fear Kayleigh had just endured, culminating in the life-changing decision to surgically remove both breasts.
Today, Kayleigh is a familiar face: a former White House press secretary who now co-hosts Fox News’ popular daily show, 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 famous BRCA2 gene mutation.
This increased Leanne’s risk of developing breast cancer by up to 84 percent and ovarian cancer by up to 27 percent.
As a result, she decided to have all of her breast tissue removed, along with a hysterectomy to eliminate as many risks as possible.
While this news was devastating for Leanne, it was deeply worrying for Kayleigh, who was told by doctors that there was a 50 per cent chance that she was also a carrier of the gene. Several months later, she was tested and, on Christmas Eve, received the devastating confirmation.
“It was a very shocking thing,” she recalls. “My doctor said, ‘You’ve tested positive.'”
Kayleigh, who was spending the holiday with her parents, burst into tears and ran downstairs to tell her family.
While recovering in hospital with her mother, Leanne McEnany (pictured), she received calls of support from both Ivanka and Donald Trump.
McEnany discovered she had the gene in 2009, but waited nearly a decade to have the surgery until she met her husband, Sean Gilmartin.
She had decided to wait until she met someone because she “thought the surgery would be less traumatic if she had a partner in life.”
Her father picked her up and said, “Kayleigh, we all have a weakness in life, but now you know yours. So attack it head on.”
At that moment, she decided to follow her mother’s courageous example.
But first came an unexpected step: In preparation for the double mastectomy, Kayleigh underwent breast implant surgery so that when her breast tissue was removed later, she wouldn’t have to undergo immediate reconstructive surgery.
Kayleigh also had to deal with what the operation meant for her future.
“I didn’t have a partner at the time,” she explains. “I didn’t have a steady boyfriend and I thought the operation would be less traumatic if I had a life partner.”
So she was late.
Every six months for the next 10 years, she traveled to a specialized cancer center in Florida for screening with mammograms or MRIs.
Over time, Kayleigh graduated from Georgetown University, studied at Oxford and then Harvard Law School. But her decade of delays was interrupted by a series of what she describes as terrifying false alarms.
“I remember being in law school and feeling a lump that made me nervous,” she says. “In the middle of preparing for exams, I would drop everything and call my[doctor]to get a mammogram. Luckily, everything turned out okay.”
But terror always haunted her. In 2017, she met and married her husband, former baseball player Sean Gilmartin, who turned out to be a blessing.
After surgery, she was promoted to White House press secretary and spent time in the Oval Office with her daughter Blake.
Blake roamed the halls of the White House while McEnany worked.
And, a year later, Kayleigh finally felt ready and decided to go ahead with the double mastectomy surgery.
“One of the main reasons I had the confidence to make this decision was that I had found a supportive husband,” she says. “He was my rock.”
Supported also by her strong Christian faith, Kayleigh found the strength to go ahead with the operation, and would be deeply happy that she did.
If Kayleigh feared she was “losing a part of myself,” her worries faded when doctors removed the bandages. In fact, she says she was in awe.
Kayleigh had opted for a nipple-sparing procedure and that, along with the implants she had had placed a decade earlier, left the appearance of her original breasts almost entirely preserved.
“I turned to my mother and asked, ‘Did they perform the operation?’ I still looked like myself,” she recalls. “The approach I had taken made me feel strong, confident and almost unchanged.
‘I didn’t feel any pain during my night in the hospital, and the only discomfort I felt during my recovery was the strain from the surgical drains hanging from small inserts in my sides and collecting excess blood.’
In retrospect, she realized that she shouldn’t have been afraid of “losing” her breasts.
“There’s this preconceived notion that[a mastectomy means]they’re getting their hair cut off,” she reflects. “Now I hate hearing that. I get angry when I hear it because it’s not like that. It doesn’t have to be so emotional. A lot of women are scared when a mastectomy is described like that.”
Kayleigh’s desire to educate other women about BRCA genes and the cancer prevention pathways now available led her to address the Republican National Convention in August 2020, just over two years after her surgery.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, Kayleigh told an audience of 17.3 million people what had happened to her and the support she had received from the Trump family in the immediate aftermath.
“I was blown away” by Trump’s support, she said. “Here was the leader of the free world caring about me.”
McEnany now hosts Outnumbered on Fox News and wants to encourage other women to discuss their options with their doctors.
By then she had been promoted to White House press secretary (after a stint working on Trump’s re-election campaign) and had moved to Washington from her family home in Florida.
The morning of her speech at the Republican National Convention, she received another call from Trump, this time to wish her luck.
“Everyone is excited about your speech,” he said. “Deliver it in an emotional and powerful way. This message is important.”
Reflecting on that moment now, Kayleigh says, “President Trump will never know how much his call meant.”
Kayleigh took the stage and told a national audience of 17.3 million people what had happened to her and the support she had received from the Trump family in the immediate aftermath.
“I was scared,” she told the crowd. “Last night I had to hold back tears as I prepared to lose a part of myself.”
“But there was the leader of the free world worrying about me,” he said.
Kayleigh tells the Mail she has never looked back and now feels a deep sense of relief.
After a deep sigh, she says, “I don’t have to worry anymore. I’m worry-free now. My chances of getting breast cancer have dropped from 84 percent to almost zero percent.”
And although she is still at higher risk for ovarian cancer, she knows she can choose to have a hysterectomy when the time is right.
Today, a mother of two young children, she wants to encourage other women to discuss their options with their doctors.
“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. “It’s important.”
