NEWSKatie Couric Admits It Was 'Hard' To Tell Her 2 Daughters About Her Breast Cancer Diagnosis: 'I Was Very Reassuring'
Oct. 3 2022, Published 11:00 a.m. ET
Ever since Katie Couric revealed she has breast cancer and underwent a lumpectomy, the former Today co-anchor has received a lot of love — especially from her two daughters, Ellie and Caroline.
"I told them, but I was very reassuring," she told Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie on the Today show on Monday, October 3, of sharing the news with her girls. "But I saw on their faces, you know, it's just hard to deliver that news, no matter how you do it. But I assured them that I was going to be fine. And Carrie came with me when I got my lumpectomy, when I was being wheeled into the operating room. She was singing 'The Arms of an Angel.' She's so funny. ... They've been incredibly supportive."
As OK! previously reported, Couric, 65, shared in an essay what she has been going through as of late — she was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer, something the doctors caught early on.
“I’m feeling just fine,” the mom-of-two said. “I finished radiation last week. They said it makes you tired. I was actually not too tired from it.”
“I just feel super lucky that it was diagnosed when it was, that I went, even though I was late, that I went when I did,” she continued.
The TV personality, whose first husband, Jay Monahan, died from colon cancer in 1998, is grateful that her radiologist acted fast.
“She said, ‘I think there’s something we really need to biopsy and I want to do it today.’ So I thought, ‘Oh my, God, you must be kidding me,’” she recalled. “And then when I found out the next day, she called me. I was pretty stunned, and I think those words ‘it’s cancerous’ or ‘you have cancer’ do stop you in their tracks, but she told me it was treatable. We needed to have a plan.”
"I was nervous about it. I waited a few days so I could process it and really understand what we were dealing with," she added.
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Since the disease runs in the family, Couric said her daughter Ellie has already undergone genetic testing.
"It really is a great tool to help you understand what you need to do vis-à-vis screening and how often you need to do it," she said. "And you should be having a conversation with your health care provider about breast cancer as early as 25 just to start the conversation."
At the end of the day, the journalist is "so grateful that they caught it early enough so it could be treated."
