CNN
—
Veteran journalist Katie Couric reported some personal news on Wednesday.
In a post on her website, Couric shared she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few months ago.
“Why Not Me,” she titled the post. “June 21, 2022, was the first day of summer, my 8th wedding anniversary, and the day I found out I had breast cancer.”
“I felt sick and the room started to spin,” Couric wrote. “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.”
She explained that her gynecologist had reminded her she was due for a mammogram since her last one was in December 2020.
Couric, who lost her first husband Jay Monahan to colon cancer in 1998, said she planned on filming the test to share with her audience, much like when she underwent colon cancer screening while working for the morning show “Today.”
Because she has dense breast tissue, she explained, she routinely undergoes a breast sonogram in addition to a mammogram since dense breasts can make it more difficult for mammograms to detect abnormalities.
The sonogram detected something and a followup biopsy determined that she had cancer.
“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.”
Her family has had better outcomes with cancer, she wrote, including her mother being “diagnosed with mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was kept at bay for a decade,” her father’s prostate cancer, and her now husband, John, having “a tumor the size of a coconut on his liver,” which was surgically removed a few months before their wedding.
Couric had surgery in July to remove a tumor from her breast that she wrote was “2.5 centimeters, roughly the size of an olive” and underwent radiation, which, she wrote, ended Tuesday.
She went public with her experience, she wrote, as a teachable moment she hopes will save lives.
“Please get your annual mammogram. I was six months late this time,” Couric wrote. “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.”
