Katie Couric shares an update on her breast cancer treatment

By Marianne Garvey

Katie Couric has shared an update on the treatment she is receiving following a breast cancer diagnosis over the summer.

The former “Today” host, who was diagnosed in June, underwent surgery in July and began radiation Sept. 7. She has completed 15 days of radiation, she said during an appearance on NBC on Monday.

“I’m feeling great. I’m just getting over a cold … but I’m feeling just fine. I finished radiation last week,” she said. “They said it made you tired, I was actually not too tired from it. I had a lumpectomy in July.”

She added, “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.”

Couric went for a breast exam in the summer and was told she needed a biopsy.

“I was like, ‘Uh-oh, what does that mean,’ and 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 was stunned by the news, she said.

“I found out the next day, she called me, I was pretty stunned. I think those words, ‘It’s cancerous or you have cancer’ do stop you in your tracks,” she said.

“But she told me it was treatable, we needed to have a plan. So I went from feeling shocked to not that shocked given my family’s history, to relieved because my exposure to cancer with Jay [her late husband] and Emily [her late sister] and my mother-in-law … they were all advanced and the prognosis was really tough, so I felt so grateful, honestly,” she said.

Couric lost her first husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer in 1998 when he was 42. She waited a few days to process her own diagnosis before telling her daughters Carrie and Ellie.

“I waited a few days so I could process it and really understand what we’re dealing with. And I FaceTimed each of them,” she said. “I was very reassuring, but I saw in their faces. It’s just hard to deliver that news no matter how you do it.”

She encouraged women to schedule a mammogram.

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