Ann Romney: 'Wanted... clock somebody'

by Mark Silva

Ann Romney, wife of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, says her husband has at least a year to make up his mind about making another bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

"You know, he's gonna have to make that decision, we'll make it together,'' she says in an appearance on FOX and Friends. "We're not ready to make that decision yet...

"It's a lot of sacrifice,'' the wife of the former Bay State governor and 2008 candidate for the GOP nomination says. "It's tough, it's a tough road and we have at least a year before we have to make that decision."

There's also a lot of tongue-biting involved.

"There were times when I wanted to like come out of my seat and clock somebody -- I mean that's how you feel,'' she says of the past campaign, in which her husband invested millions of dollars of his own money in a failed bid for the party's nomination. "I mean, sometimes you just want to come out and just go at them, you know -- that's the human response that you want to give and yet you don't. I mean, you learn to just take a deep breath."

In general, though, she "liked being with Mitt while he was a politician,'' the former first lady of Massachusetts says in an interview with FOX's Gretchen Carlson. " I don't think that anyone would ever really enjoy that role,'' she noted. "I just enjoy my life so much just being with him, and if that's what we're going to do, that's what we're going to do together, and so that was fine by me."

Ann Romney also kept her own private suffering under wraps for some time, only recently announcing that she had been treated for breast cancer detected in its early stage.

"I had surgery right about this time, right before Christmas last year and then I started my radiation in the end of January,'' she says.

"It was breast cancer -- diagnosed from mammograms... but very early stage, and I was really lucky,'' she says, explaining why she kept the disease private. "We were not in the public eye anymore and there was no reason for me to be out again being in the public eye, when you're going through a crisis you really just kind of want to have your family around and your husband."

So she, for one, has little use for that recent government advisory panel recommendation that women can wait until their 50s for regular mammograms. "If I were a 40-year old woman, 40 to 50, I'd want to be getting my mammograms. They catch cancers, and cancer is very curable if you catch it early."

(Photo of Ann and Mitt Romney courtesy of FOX News.)