![]() My mood quickly shifted from disbelief to resignation. My now-husband John had a tumor the size of a coconut on his liver, which was surgically removed just a few months before we got married. My father’s prostate cancer, which was treated with radioactive seeds. My mom was diagnosed with mantle cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was kept at bay for a decade. There were better outcomes for others in my family. 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. My sister Emily’s pancreatic cancer, which would later kill her at 54, just as her political career was really taking off. 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. What does this mean? Will I need a mastectomy? Will I need chemo? What will the next weeks, months, even years look like? 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. ![]() I felt sick and the room started to spin. You’re going to be fine but we need to make a plan.” My mailbox is always full - with messages going back to 2016.) The next day I was at the office, the first time I’d been face to face with my colleagues at Katie Couric Media (KCM) in a very long time.Ī text came in: “Please call me in the office to discuss biopsy results. I left with gauze in my bra and the promise she would be in touch. I wasn’t super stoked about having a needle penetrate my breast to extract several tissue samples, but I was grateful she was being so thorough. It could be scar tissue,” she said (I had a breast reduction in 2016), “but I would feel more comfortable if I did a biopsy.” “There’s something here that I’d like to check out. When she came back, she asked us to stop filming. Drossman traversed my breasts, sliding the wand-like device over the gooey gel, and then left the room. Because my breasts are dense, I routinely get an additional screening using a breast ultrasound. Then I was escorted to another exam room. Ever the ham, I was cracking jokes and making faces to the camera as I explained what was going on. Compared to a standard mammogram, the 3D model gives clinicians a more complete view of the breast tissue. I handed my phone to a technician and asked if she could film me (in a very PG kind of way) as one by one, my breasts were squished between two plastic trays in a state-of-the-art 3D mammogram machine. If I had forgotten to schedule a mammogram, this might be a helpful reminder for other people, too. After that segment, the number of people getting colonoscopies increased by 20 percent. You might remember I aired my colonoscopy on the TODAY show in 2000. This wasn’t exactly new territory for me. Susan Drossman, with the intention of recording the screening to share with my audience. On June 20, I headed to the office of my breast radiologist, Dr. Wait, what? How could that be? Had the pandemic given me a skewed sense of time? Had it messed with my memory?
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