While she has been proudly cancer-free for 18 years, Hoda Kotb shared why she didn’t undergo chemotherapy following her breast cancer diagnosis in 2007.
“I remember after my diagnosis, I went to three other specialists. I had a mastectomy, and one doctor said, ‘You need chemo.’ One said, ‘You don’t need chemo.’ And one said, ‘You can’t make a mistake either way,’” Hoda, 60, recalled on the Wednesday, March 26, episode of her “Making Space” podcast. “One person said, ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t do it.’ I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I have chills right now thinking about it.”
The former Today show host shared that her decision was “clear” that she wouldn’t undergo chemotherapy when she was informed that the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes. However, Hoda did undergo a mastectomy, which successfully removed all the cancer cells from her body.
Hoda has been transparent about her cancer diagnosis with fans and expressed how she not only dealt with her health battle, but how she accepted changes to her body following her mastectomy.
During a May 2022 episode of the fourth hour of the Today show, Hoda told former cohost Jenna Bush Hager how she accepted to love her scars from the invasive procedure. In addition to the incision scars on her chest, Hoda has another that stretches from each side of her hips.
“I remember afterwards having to get washed in the hospital and I hadn’t seen it because I just hadn’t looked at it. And a nurse came in to help me and she stood me in front of the mirror and I was horrified,” she recalled at the time. “You know when you look and you’re like, ‘That’s me now? This is the body for the rest of my life that is going to carry me through?’”
Hoda admitted that she didn’t see the scars as, “‘The cancer’s gone.’ In that moment, you just see the scar only and you don’t think that you’ll ever feel good about yourself because you’re always going to be hiding.”
The TV personality has since become an inspiration to other women battling breast cancer, and Hoda makes sure to continuously shed light on the disease. Even her testimonial has encouraged people to apologetically live a fearless life.
“I got sick with breast cancer, and after I was done with that, I had this epiphany. Four words: ‘You can’t scare me,’” Hoda previously told NBCUAcademy. “I had just gone through the worst thing in my life, and I thought, ‘If there’s something I want, I’m going to ask for it.’ There was a new hour of Today. So, I decided it was time to ask for something.”
Hoda was offered the cohosting role of the fourth hour of Today three weeks after bravely telling executives that she wanted the open role.
The journalist made her debut on Today in September 2007 and was later joined by cohost Kathie Lee Gifford. The duo brought the show to success before Kathie’s 2019 exit, leading Jenna, 43, to permanently fill her role. After waking up with America on the Today show for more than 17 years, she gracefully departed the show in January to focus on raising her daughters, Haley, 7, and Hope, 5.
