Katie Couric says she’s feeling fine after radiation treatments for breast cancer

Journalist Katie Couric said she feels fine and lucky after being diagnosed with breast cancer in June and finishing radiation treatment.

“I’m feeling just fine,” Couric said during an interview with Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb on NBC’s “Today,” which Couric previously anchored. “I finished radiation last week. They said it makes you tired. I was actually not too tired from it.”

Couric also discussed the importance of getting screened for cancer. She detailed how she found out about her diagnosis following a mammogram, which she got six months later than recommended.

“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,” she said.

Couric became a longtime advocate for timely cancer screenings after her first husband in 1998 died from colon cancer, but she said she received a mammogram late because of the pandemic.

“A lot of screening places shut down,” she said on Monday. “I think the cadence of our lives changed, and I think we just got off track, and that happened to me as well.”

In 2000, NBC aired Couric getting a colonoscopy on “Today,” and she said the number of people getting colonoscopies increased by 20 percent following the segment.

Couric said on Monday that she began filming herself receiving the recent mammogram but stopped after her doctor asked her to do so, saying she wanted to perform a biopsy, which ultimately revealed the cancer.

She had a lumpectomy in July to remove the 2.5-centimeter tumor and started radiation last month.

“I was pretty stunned, and I think those words ‘it’s cancerous’ or ‘you have cancer’ do stop you in your tracks, but she told me it was treatable,” Couric said on NBC. “We needed to have a plan. So I went to feeling shocked to not that shocked, given my family’s history, and to relieved.”

The American Cancer society recommends women with average risk aged 45 to 54 get mammograms every year while indicating that women 55 and older can switch to screenings every other year.