SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Former Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Carly Fiorina has been diagnosed with breast cancer, a top aide said Tuesday.

Fiorina was diagnosed with the disease Feb. 20 and underwent surgery Monday at Stanford Hospital, her chief of staff, Deborah Bowker, told The Associated Press. Bowker said the surgery was successful and Fiorina has an “excellent” prognosis for a full recovery.

The San Francisco Chronicle earlier reported Fiorina’s condition.

Fiorina is a Republican who served as an adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and has been considered a possible candidate for elected office. She has not announced any plans to run.

“She’s keeping her options open,” Bowker said.

Fiorina, 54, who lives in Los Altos Hills, Calif., spoke at the state GOP convention in Sacramento last month, urging the party to offer voters a positive agenda of lower taxes and less government.

She has a mixed record as an executive.

Fiorina was a star at AT&T and its spinoff Lucent Technologies – companies at which she had worked for nearly two decades – but she had a rocky six years at Palo Alto-based HP, where she took the top job in 1999.

Fiorina was known as a divisive manager, with a marketing and branding bent that made her an odd fit inside HP’s hardcore techie culture. Her sweeping changes to wrestle the technology icon into the Internet age rankled some longtime HPers.

Her biggest achievement at HP – pushing through the hugely controversial $24 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer, a deal bitterly opposed by descendants of HP’s founders – was a source of strife at the time.

But it wound up being a shrewd decision that paid off after she was forced out in 2005.

The Compaq acquisition helped HP regain the title of world’s biggest personal-computer seller, a position it still holds today.