Anchor, breast cancer survivor shares journey
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By Mary Louise Speer | Sunday, March 09, 2008 |
Hoda Kotb shares a laugh with the crowd at the RiverCenter on Saturday. Kotb is a breast cancer survivor, former WQAD anchor and correspondent for NBC’s The Today Show and Dateline. (Elisa Petersen/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo
Hoda Kotb, co-anchor of the fourth hour on NBC’s Today Show, shared moments of her journey through breast cancer Saturday with people attending the 2008 KWQC-TV 6 Women’s Health and Lifestyles Fair.
Kotb, whose journalistic credits include Dateline NBC correspondent and a former morning anchor and general assignment reporter for WQAD-TV, Moline, appeared as confident in the camera’s eye as speaking in front of groups.
But very real anguish seeped through as she talked about learning the lumps in her breast were cancerous. She was in her office at NBC and noticed the call coming in was from the hospital. “The guy said, not good news for you. Everything else fuzzed out,” she said.
The next challenge was telling people about the diagnosis. Especially difficult was trying to find a way to frame the words for her mother. “She was a trooper,” Kotb said.
It wasn’t the first time Kotb relied on her mother’s encouragement to make it through a trying time. She graduated from college in 1986 and borrowed her mom’s car to drive to a job interview in Richmond, Va. The man turned Kotb down but sent her to a colleague in Roanoke, Va. Over the next 10 days, she listened as station after station told her: “Sorry, but you’re not ready for (fill in city),” she said.
Twenty-seven rejections later, she headed for home and returned the car to her mother. Her persistence was finally repaid after interviewing for WXVT-TV, Greenville, Miss., and hearing the words: “Hoda, I like what I see.”
“You do?” she asked.
She learned how incredibly resilient people are while interviewing victims after the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. She interviewed a man and learned one of his daughters had survived the huge wave. The other daughter was missing. He combed through makeshift morgues and unzipped body bags looking to see if the occupants were his child.
“What do you say to God?” Kotb asked during the interview. “I say thank you,” he told her.
That fortitude stayed with her while waiting to go through a mastectomy in 2007. “As it got closer, I was getting more and more nervous,” she said. “There were marital issues at the time so I was facing this without my husband.”
Medical staff created a road map in magic markers on her chest and stomach and her mother and sister cried with her in the hospital room — and then it was time to go to the operating table.
She woke after an eight hour surgery feeling incredibly lucky. The worst was over — and she’d received a tummy tuck at the same time as the surgeons used muscle, fat and skin from her abdomen to help reconstruct her breast.
The battle taught her “that when you are enduring something really, really difficult, there’s a silver lining.” she said. “They teach you that your life has margins. It’s to be valued and not wasted. You keep the people close who matter the most and you push away the people who don’t.”
On a lighter note she shared her impressions of co-anchors, including Al Roker who is “hilarious and crazy.” Ann (Curry) is the best, she said. Their work day begins early at 5 a.m., a time when most people are hugging their pillows.
Yes, her name is real and not made up. Both her mom and dad were raised in Egypt and Hoda is a common name there, she said.
At the end of the talk, Heather Donahue, 8, of Sterling, Ill., thanked Kotb for coming and told the co-anchor how beautiful she is. Someday Heather hopes to appear on broadcast news like Kotb, “telling everyone about my life,” she said.
The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.
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