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ABC News correspondent Amy Robach has breast cancer, she announced on Monday’s Good Morning America.
Robach, 40, discovered she had the disease after she reluctantly had an on-air mammogram at the beginning of October.
“I had been putting it off for a year, between traveling around the world for work and running around with my kids to school and ballet and gymnastics. Like so many women, I’d just kept pushing it off,” she explained in a video that aired on the ABC morning show Monday.
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Robach realized that if she had been putting it off, other women probably had been as well. She shared that GMA host Robin Roberts convinced her to do it, saying that if one life can be saved, it’s all worth it.
After she had the mammogram, she was asked to come back for more tests and learned last week that her on-air exam allowed doctors to detect that she had the disease.
Robach never thought she had cancer, she wrote in an article on ABCNews.com.
“I would have considered it virtually impossible that I would have cancer. I work out, I eat right, I take care of myself and I have very little family history; in fact, all of my grandparents are still alive,” she wrote.
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Her next step is a bilateral mastectomy on Thursday, followed by reconstructive surgery, Robach wrote. After that, she said she’ll know more about how her doctors plan to combat the disease.
They did note, though, that she caught it early, telling her, “That mammogram just saved your life.”
Reflecting on her diagnosis, Robach said in her GMA video, “I know that I have a fight ahead of me, but I also know that I have a lot worth fighting for. And I’m so grateful that I got that mammogram that day at GMA, Robin’s words still echoing inside of me, ‘If I got the mammogram on air and it saved one life, then it’s all worth it,’ she had said. It never occurred to me that life would be mine.”
Robach wrote that she hoped her experience would inspire other women to get mammograms.
The ABC News correspondent, who’s married to Melrose Place alum Andrew Shue, previously worked for NBC, co-hosting the weekend edition of its Today show. Last week on Today, co-hosts Matt Lauer and Al Roker underwent on-air prostate exams.
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