CNN
–
Veteran journalist Katie Couric reported some personal news on Wednesday.
in a post on it websiteCouric shares that she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few months ago.
Post title “Why Not Me”. “June 21, 2022, was the first day of summer, my eighth wedding anniversary, and the day I found out I had breast cancer.”
“I felt sick and the room started spinning,” Couric wrote. “I was in the middle of an open office, so I walked into a corner and spoke softly, my mouth unable to keep up with the questions running through my head.”
She explained that her gynecologist had reminded her that she had been about to have a mammogram since the last one was in December 2020.
Couric, who lost her first husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer in 1998, said she planned to film the test to share with her audience, such as when she got tested for colon cancer while working on the “Today” morning show.
She explained that because she has dense breast tissue, she routinely undergoes a mammogram in addition to a mammogram because dense breasts can make it difficult for mammograms to detect abnormalities.
An ultrasound detected something and a follow-up biopsy concluded that she had cancer.
“The heart-stopping suspense animation I remember so well is back: Jay’s diagnosis of colon cancer at the age of 41 and the nine months that followed,” she wrote. “My sister Emily’s pancreatic cancer, which later killed her at age 54, just as her political career was already taking off. The ovarian cancer that my mother-in-law Carol had, which she was battling when she buried her son, a year and nine months before she herself was buried.”
She wrote that her family had better outcomes with cancer, including her mother’s “mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which has been away for a decade,” and her father’s prostate cancer, and now her husband, John, “a coconut-sized tumor on his liver.” It was surgically removed a few months before their wedding.
Couric had surgery in July to remove a tumor from her chest that she wrote was “2.5 centimeters, roughly the size of an olive” and underwent radiation, which he wrote expired on Tuesday.
She wrote about her experience publicly as a teachable moment that she hopes will save lives.
Please get your annual mammogram. “You’re six months late this time,” Couric wrote. “I shudder when I think of what would have happened if I had put him off any longer. But just as important, please see if you need an extra check.”
