Journalist Katie Couric announced on Wednesday that she was diagnosed with breast cancer in June and completed radiation earlier this month.
via: Daily Beast
In a post on her personal website, the former Today anchor revealed doctors informed her of her illness a few months ago and she urged others to get checked out. “June 21, 2022, was the first day of summer, my 8th wedding anniversary, and the day I found out I had breast cancer,” Couric wrote.
“I felt sick and the room started to spin. I was in the middle of an open office, so I walked to a corner and spoke quietly, my mouth unable to keep up with the questions swirling in my head. ‘What does this mean? Will I need a mastectomy? Will I need chemo? What will the next weeks, months, even years look like?’”
Couric, 65, said she underwent surgery on July 14, explaining that doctors removed a tumor that was “2.5 centimeters, roughly the size of an olive.” She also began radiation on Sept. 7, with her most recent session on Tuesday.
Pathology results showed that her cancer was stage 1A, and that the chances of it returning were “considered low enough to forgo chemotherapy.”
Couric, who lost her first husband Jay Monahan to colon cancer in 1998, said her own diagnosis brought back painful memories of how cancer has affected her loved ones.
“The heart-stopping, suspended animation feeling I remember all too well came flooding back: Jay’s colon cancer diagnosis at 41 and the terrifying, gutting nine months that followed,” she wrote. “My sister Emily’s pancreatic cancer, which would later kill her at 54, just as her political career was really taking off. My mother-in-law Carol’s ovarian cancer, which she was fighting as she buried her son, a year and nine months before she herself was laid to rest.”
Couric added that she decided to share her personal story with cancer in the hope that more people might get themselves screened.
“Please get your annual mammogram,” Couric wrote. “I was six months late this time. I shudder to think what might have happened if I had put it off longer. But just as importantly, please find out if you need additional screening.”
