Katie Couric is feeling “great” after 15 days of radiation cure for breast cancer.
Appearing on the TODAY Show Monday, much less than a week after revealing her diagnosis, Couric, 65, defined how she felt “lucky” to have had her most cancers detected at stage 1A so that remedy may want to begin early.
“I’m feeling great. I’m just getting over a cold,” Couric told the TODAY show. “I’m feeling just fine. I finished radiation last week. They said it made you tired, I was not too tired from it.
“I just feel super lucky that it was diagnosed when it was,” Couric continued, while stressing the need for women to have regular mammograms, without which her cancer would not have been caught so early.
Couric first shared information about her most cancers analysis in a non-public essay posted on her internet site on Sept. 28. This published that she had been identified with breast most cancers on June 21, and had a lumpectomy on July 14. Doctors eliminated a tumor she stated used to be “2.5 centimeters, roughly the dimension of an olive.”
The journalist additionally shared that pathology showed the probability of most cancers returning used to be “considered low ample to forgo chemotherapy.” She began her radiation on Sept. 7, with her last spherical going on Sept. 26.
Speaking to TODAY Couric introduced that she used to be “stunned” to acquire the prognosis from her doctor, including that the phrase “It’s cancerous or you have cancer,” truly caught her off-guard.
Despite this, the journalist stated she quickly developed a diploma of point of view about her prognosis as a result of having misplaced her first husband, Jay Monahan, to colon most cancers in 1998 and her sister, Emily Couric, to pancreatic cancers in 2001.
Couric’s 2nd husband John Molner additionally had “a tumor the dimension of a coconut on his liver” eliminated before their 2014 wedding, she cited in her internet site essay. Her mother, Elinor Couric, was once additionally recognized with mantle telephone non-Hodgkin lymphoma earlier than her death from pneumonia in 2014, whilst her father, John Couric, was once identified with prostate cancers before his 2011 loss of life from Parkinson’s. Couric’s mother-in-law, Carol Monahan, additionally died from ovarian most cancers on Sept. 11, 1999.
“She (her doctor) instructed me it was once treatable, we wanted to have a plan,” Couric defined on TODAY. “So I went from feeling taken aback to now not that stunned given my family’s history, to relieved due to the fact my publicity to most cancers with Jay and Emily and my mother-in-law… they had been all superior and the prognosis used to be genuinely tough, so I felt so grateful, honestly.”
Like all parents, however, Couric she nevertheless felt “nervous” telling her daughters, Carrie and Ellie about her diagnosis, and ended up calling them for my part with the news.
“I waited a few days so I may want to system it and actually recognize what we’re dealing with. And I FaceTimed every of them,” she said. “I was once very reassuring, however I noticed in their faces. It’s simply tough to supply that information no remember how you do it.”
Couric is now urging different girls to get normal mammograms and is in talks with Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who is pushing regulation that requires insurance businesses to cowl ultrasounds for ladies with dense breasts so that sufferers do no longer pay more costs.
“All these breast cancer diagnoses would manifest an awful lot previously if, in fact, ladies with dense breasts had breast ultrasounds,” Couric stated Monday.
Couric has co-founded a number of lookup and charity companies to battle cancer. Nearly 15 years old, Stand Up To Cancer, an initiative created to speed up progressive most cancers research, has already added in $746 million from fundraising efforts.
Following her first husband’s death, Couric famously used her nationwide platform to elevate attention of the significance of getting checked for colon most cancers by way of having a colonoscopy on-air Today. Years later, she took Jimmy Kimmel to get a colonoscopy on digicam in 2018.
