CNN
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Veteran journalist Katie Couric reported some personal news on Wednesday.
in her post websiteCouric shared that she was diagnosed with breast cancer months ago.
“Why Not Me,” she titled the post. “June 21, 2022 was her early summer day, her eighth wedding anniversary, and the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer.”
“I felt sick and the room started spinning,” Couric wrote. “I was in the middle of an open office, so I walked over to a corner and spoke quietly, unable to keep up with the questions swirling in my head.”
She explained that her last mammogram was in December 2020 and her OB/GYN told her she was due for a mammogram.
Couric, who lost her first husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer in 1998, filmed the test just as she did when she was screened for colon cancer while working on the morning show Today. He said he plans to share it with viewers.
She explained that she has regular breast ultrasounds in addition to mammograms because she has dense breast tissue.
An ultrasound detected something, and a follow-up biopsy revealed she had cancer.
“The heart-stopping, paused-animated feeling I remember so well returned. Jay’s diagnosis of colon cancer at age 41 and the terrifying, gut-wrenching nine months that followed.” Pancreatic cancer killed her at the age of 54, just as her political career was taking off in earnest.My mother-in-law, Carol, was battling ovarian cancer and died when she buried her son. She had been battling illness for a year and nine months before she herself was buried.”
Her family had a good cancer outcome, with her mother “diagnosed with mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and shunned for 10 years”, her father prostate cancer, and now-husband John with “his liver disease.” A “coconut-sized tumor” was surgically removed months before the wedding.
Couric underwent surgery in July to remove a tumor from her breast, which was “2.5 centimeters, about the size of an olive,” and underwent radiation therapy.
She published her experience, she wrote, as a instructive moment in hopes of saving lives.
“Get your annual mammogram. This time it was six months late,” wrote Couric. “It’s horrifying to think what would have happened if we’d put it off longer. But just as important, see if additional screening is needed.”