A little more than a month after Good Morning America's longtime movie critic Joel Siegel succumbed to colon cancer, the ABC morning show has been rocked with more bad news.
In a stunner of an announcement, GMA coanchor Robin Roberts announced Tuesday she has been diagnosed with breast cancer.
"I never thought I'd be writing...I have breast cancer," she writes in a message posted on ABCNews.com.
"It all started a few weeks ago. We had gotten the news that our dear colleague and friend Joel Siegel had passed away and we began preparing for our special tribute show for him. I did a piece about Joel's courageous battle with cancer, reporting on the way my friend had lived his life and been such a successful advocate for the importance of early cancer screenings.
"That very night when I went to bed, I did a self breast exam and found something that women everywhere fear: I found a lump."
Roberts immediately went to the doctor, and a biopsy determined she had "an early form of breast cancer."
"Hearing the doctor say those words out loud was surreal," Robert writes.
But the 46-year-old telejournalist is remaining upbeat.
"I am so blessed that I found this in the early stages and the prognosis is so promising that my doctor expects me to be flying planes and hanging on to submarines in the middle of the Atlantic and scaling the Mayan pyramids in no time," she adds.
Roberts, who rose from news reader to GMA coanchor in May 2005, is scheduled to undergo surgery on Friday and will then begin a course of treatment. She did not go into further detail.
In discussing her medical condition on Tuesday's program with coanchor Diane Sawyer, Roberts noted there's no history of the disease in her family and said she is determined to be a cancer survivor.
"I will get up like everybody else, I will go to work, I'll say 'Good Morning America,' I will have my good days and bad days, so be kind to me on the message board when I've had my bad days and the hair goes," she joked, then grabbed Sawyer's hand and raised it up. "This is my Thelma. We call ourselves Thelma and Louise, and we're in the convertible right now. Full speed ahead."
Roberts closed the segment thanking viewers for their love and support and preaching the value of early detection.
More than 250,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year, but the survival rate has climbed thanks to increased education about the disease and early screenings to help catch it before it spreads.
source ; www.eonline.com
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