Katie Couric has revealed she was diagnosed with breast cancer in June.
On 28 September, the former TV anchor shared on her website that she is being treated for breast cancer after she was nearly two years overdue for a mammogram.
In the post, titled “Why NOT Me?”, Couric explained how her doctor reminded her that she had not received a mammogram – an x-ray picture of the breast used to check for breast cancer in women – since December 2020.
“Wait, what? How could that be? Had the pandemic given me a skewed sense of time? Had it messed with my memory?” Couric wrote in her blog post.
She told her gynecologist that she would schedule a mammogram “ASAP” and got screened on 20 June. Couric said that she was filming her visit when the technician asked her to stop filming because they had found some abnormal tissue and decided to perform a biopsy.
The following day, Couric learned on her eighth wedding anniversary that she had breast cancer.
“I felt sick and the room started to spin,” she wrote on her Katie Couric Media website. “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, who lost her first husband to colon cancer in 1998, described the “suspended animation feeling” she experienced after learning she had breast cancer. Her husband, Jay Monahan, died when he was just 41 years old and her sister, Emily, died from pancreatic cancer when she was 54.
“My mood quickly shifted from disbelief to resignation,” she said. “Given my family’s history of cancer, why would I be spared? My reaction went from ‘Why me?’ to ‘Why not me?’”
The 64-year-old author also recalled the moment she told her daughters – Ellie, 31, and Carrie, 26 – about her diagnosis. She FaceTimed each of them, but reassured her daughters that it was treatable. “They’d already lost one parent. The idea of losing another was unfathomable,” Couric said.
The journalist underwent a lumpectomy on 14 July at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Her doctors said that she would not need chemotherapy because the chances of her cancer returning were low. However, she would need radiation treatment.
“Yesterday was my final round,” she revealed on Wednesday. “My left breast does look like I’ve been sunbathing topless, but other than that, I’ve felt fine.”
Couric took the opportunity to spread awareness about receiving an annual mammogram, and remind people with “dense breasts” that they might need additional screening for breast cancer.
“Please get your annual mammogram. I was six months late this time,” she said. “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.”
